Reactivity Inc and AmberPoint announced a technology partnership to deliver optimized, integrated solutions for securing and managing enterprise-class Web services-based systems. The partners have integrated their products to fully leverage the advantages of their technologies while improving system-wide functionality through effective, bidirectional communication.

"The strengths of assembling best-of-breed solutions include deploying technologies with a strong, granular focus on a particular set of functionalities -- such as management or security -- that may be most important to an organization," said Frank Kenney, research analyst at Gartner Inc.

The first phase of the AmberPoint-Reactivity integration has been completed and proven in the field with initial customers. The AmberPoint agent now provides all the functionality of Reactivity Gatekeeper, delivering "last mile" security between the network edge and the application server to ensure that no one within the organization accidentally or deliberately gains unauthorized access to any Web service. Additionally, the Reactivity Gateway now provides data on service level agreements (SLAs), quality of service (QoS) and security operations for use by AmberPoint's extensive reports and dashboards, enabling in-depth analysis of performance across the complete enterprise Web services infrastructure. The AmberPoint management system also provides critical performance and management information on a per-Gateway basis, including response time (maximum, average, message-specific), throughput (maximum, average, interval-specific), SOAP fault counts, faults ratio and availability.

"The integration of AmberPoint and Reactivity improves Web services security and reliability for customers of both companies," said John Lilly, CTO of Reactivity. "Our ongoing work with AmberPoint is delivering intelligently integrated product sets without compromising the advantages of each company's pioneering architecture. Our standards-based approach to end-to-end Web services security facilitates such seamless integration with a variety of SAML infrastructure components."

The Reactivity Gateway enforces XML Web services security policies and offers the market's leading XML threat defense, while delivering any-to-any XML Web services interoperability. The centralized definition, enforcement and management of security and operational policies establish new levels of trust among applications, and help ensure compliance with privacy and data protection laws. Reactivity's dedicated appliances process and secure XML and SOAP messages to improve network and application throughput, and enable an organization's existing operations staff to operate and maintain clusters of appliances across geographically distributed data centers for maximum operational scalability.

"Actively pursuing partnerships with technology pioneers and industry leaders such as Reactivity is key to our success in the Web services marketplace," said Paul Butterworth, CTO of AmberPoint. "AmberPoint's comprehensive policy-based management capabilities integrate seamlessly with Reactivity's unique ability to rapidly deploy secure XML Web services and optimize traffic throughput, enabling our mutual customers to deploy loosely coupled applications to perform important new roles in their enterprise IT systems."

AmberPoint provides the critical management layer needed to realize the return on investment from distributed, heterogeneous, service-oriented systems. AmberPoint's solutions provide comprehensive management and security capabilities without requiring any changes to the services themselves. AmberPoint was the first Web services management vendor with solutions that run natively in both .NET and Java, enabling its software products to fully leverage the advantages of both prevailing Web services platforms.

The two companies will continue to sell their own products, and will engage in joint sales and marketing activities, including product demonstrations. Cooperative integration efforts are ongoing in response to customer demand, and each company will continue to license its technology independently.