In-Depth

BMC to Web Services-Enable Service Management Tool

Company says Web services interfaces can simplify how customers and partners integrate SIM with their applications and products

• By Stephen Swoyer
• 04/20/2004

Officials say that BMC has tapped Systinet’s Web Applications and Services Platform (WASP) to deliver a new toolkit, called Impact Integration Developer’s Kit, that can be used to build integration solutions for SIM.

Houston, Texas-based BMC positions SIM as one of the cornerstones in its business service management (BSM) initiative. “SIM can take these raw events and make them into service models, so you’re able to define the impact of your IT infrastructure into your business services,” explains Luigi Suardi, development manager in BMC’s R&D operations group. “What we announced [with Systinet’s WASP technology] is a toolkit for building integration solutions that will allow different event sources and data sources to [integrate with] SIM.”

Systinet WASP Server for Java and WASP Server for C++ are Web services runtime environments that support industry standards such as SOAP 1.1, SOAP 1.2, and WSDL 1.1. Systinet’s WASP UDDI offers compliance with UDDI version 2 and, officials say, support for advanced UDDI version 3 functionality.

Suardi says Web services interfaces can simplify how customers and partners integrate SIM with their applications and products. “It provides incredible flexibility and ease of use,” he maintains. “We’ve already worked with a couple of customers and system integrators to address some of their problems, and we’ve solved them quickly using Web services. We did some things to quickly integrate with BizTalk [from Microsoft Corp.].”

BMC has licensed WASP for use as the recommended development tool kit for its development teams, Suardi says, and could introduce Web services integration with other products, such as Patrol. “Today SIM has integration into various components, for example Patrol Enterprise Manager, [it] has integration into Patrol Classic, and we’re working on integration with [MainView on the] mainframe,” he says.

Suari notes that BMC is also content to allow vendors such as Systinet do most of the Web services infrastructure heavy lifting. “I don’t think we want to develop Web services infrastructure. What we’re interested in is Web services management, and we’re working this area also, and I think you’ll know more later this year when we’re coming up with a strategy in this area."

One potential application that developers can build using the new toolkit is an event listener. “One of the capabilities available today is for the Service Impact Manager to propagate out some of the events, … so the toolkit allows you to create listeners, so you can create your own application as a Web service consumer that listens for events from the [Service] Impact Manager."