Forum Systems announced the availability of Version 4.1 for its award-winning Forum Sentry Web Services Security Gateway. Forum Sentry 4.1 has evolved from securing Web services within service-oriented architectures to protecting event-driven applications, allowing for the reliability and robustness enterprises are looking for to deal with exceptions and fluctuations in complex asynchronous software services such as supply chain, financial transactions and manufacturing. New technology advancements include secure message and protocol intermediation -- a unique blend of protocol mixing, content-based routing and event security -- that streamlines the adoption of event-driven applications using XML and Web services while leveraging existing investments in enterprise message-oriented middleware.

Equally as important to service-orientation is the use of event-driven applications that take business events, such as the under-booking of a particular flight, and then trigger a business process to lower fares accordingly. By putting into place event-driven business processes enterprises can move away from static and hardwired business rules to ones that are dynamic and corrective. Batch-processing is replaced with responsive work orders. Forum Sentry 4.1 is able to secure many-to-many, asynchronous interactions using existing message-oriented-middleware (MOM) such as Tibco Rendezvous, JMS and IBM WebSphere MQ and message-level XML and Web services authentication, authorization and routing.

"Until specifications such as WS-Addressing, WS-Eventing and WS-Notification are ready for prime time, enterprises are pacing themselves by leveraging existing investments," said Walid Negm, vice president of product marketing for Forum Systems. "Forum Sentry avoids the 'rip-and-replace' approach and instead favors 'extending-and-enhancing' what customers have in place to today."

"As 2005 proves to be a banner year for SOAs, enterprises will be looking for solutions that provide the broadest possible array of deployment options," said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC. "Forum Systems provides more than simply a firewall for XML and Web Services traffic. With the release of Forum Sentry 4.1, the company provides a wide range of secure Web Services capabilities that enable sophisticated enterprise implementations of SOAs."

The Forum Sentry Web Services Security Gateway plays a pivotal role as a service-oriented security intermediary that protects interleaved business processes and technologies across machine-to-machine interactions. The Forum Sentry 4.1 ensures frictionless enablement of event-driven applications with the following new capabilities: