The Oakland-based company said last week it is working on integration between its Management Foundation and Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET web services development platform, so that programs created under .NET can be deployed and managed by AmberPoint in just five clicks.

The relationship with Microsoft has put us in a tough-to-compete-with slot, said AmberPoint VP of marketing Ed Horst, acknowledging that the web services management market has become extremely crowded over the last year. AmberPoint has also raised $23m in venture funding, enough to last until 2005, Horst said.

The companies have been working together since last summer, when AmberPoint agreed to port its software, originally written for Java application servers, to the .NET platform. A selling point for the company now is the ability to manage web services running on both major platforms from one application.

Microsoft is being very adult about the fact that their customers’ environments are heterogeneous, Horst said. There are very few .NET shops that don’t have Java somewhere in the mix, and very few Java shops that don’t have .NET somewhere in the mix.

Management Foundation uses agents installed on application servers that scan inbound and outbound web services messages and apply centralized policies to them. The software can route SOAP messages based on the values of individual XML fields, for example. Logging, monitoring, encryption and authorization are also possible.

Horst said the distributed architecture helps the system be more scalable than some rival offerings, which use a firewall or gateway style approach, whereby SOAP is fed through a dedicated server. That approach means you’re throttled by limitations of the throughput of that server and opens up a single point of failure, he said.

Horst identified Ireland-based WestGlobal Ltd and San Francisco’s Blue Titan Software Inc as notable competitors. Other companies that have emerged in AmberPoint’s space recently include Flamenco Networks Inc, WestBridge Technology Inc and Confluent Software Inc (which also has a relationship with Microsoft).

Source: Computerwire