SOA Software Launches ESB Federation Solution

Published: June 27, 2006

by Alex Woodie

With so many vendors selling enterprise service bus (ESB) solutions, it's just a matter of time before customers begin struggling to keep their various ESBs in synch. To that end, SOA Software last week unveiled a new release of Network Director, which it claims is the industry's first federated ESB product.

SOA Software's new Network Director solution is a combination of its previously available Service Manager product and the Network Director technology it acquired with Blue Titan last month. The software uses intermediaries (agents and proxies) and delegates (client SDKs and handlers) to access and enforce the central policy and performance management capabilities provided by the Service Manager component.

According to SOA Software, Network Director ensures that disparate platforms enforce and implement a centrally defined integration policy, and that they interoperate as a reliable, high-performance, and secure messaging environment.

"Our vision is to provide a set of common infrastructure services to a federated ecosystem of intermediaries," says Frank Martinez, the former CEO and CTO of Blue Titan, who has taken the role of executive vice president at SOA Software. "Network Director's powerful mediation capabilities, combined with the management, security and governance features of Service Manager, creates a formidable SOA infrastructure that enables true ESB federation."