The company claims to be the first to offer the choice of software or managed service, in a young market that is becoming increasingly crowded with companies offering all manner of ways to manage and secure web services traffic.
I think this market will be a lot like the VPN space, where some larger companies will want to buy this and manage it in house, some will want to outsource, said senior VP of sales and marketing John Hanger. We leverage that in the sales cycle… We find that to be a competitive advantage for us.
As well as providing an enterprise version, the company provides its software to service providers that want to offer a web services management service to their customers. The largest such license Flamenco has sold was to BT Ignite, part of BT Group Plc, in the UK.
The system comprises a centralized management applications and one or more distributed SOAP proxies. These proxies act as gateways for SOAP traffic as it enters or leaves a network, and are responsible for applying whatever policies the company has set to the messages.
Possible policies include security (signing, encrypting, authentication, authorizing), monitoring and logging and reporting. The system can also be used to provision web services quickly to large numbers of users.
Flamenco, which started offering a commercial service in October 2001, faces competition from the likes of AmberPoint, WestBridge Technologies and Confluent Software, which provide web services management software. It arguably also competes against the likes of Vordel, Reactivity and DataPower in the security aspect of what it does.
Source: Computerwire
