AmberPoint announced that it has introduced the industry’s first agentless system for SOA runtime governance. With its ground-breaking new architecture, AmberPoint has decoupled the enforcement of SOA runtime governance policies from the execution of those policies. AmberPoint can now delegate policy execution to existing SOA infrastructure, enabling organizations to better leverage the intrinsic and increasingly sophisticated capabilities of XML appliances, Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs), application servers, operating systems and other SOA infrastructure.

AmberPoint’s SOA runtime governance system simplifies real-time visibility and control at each stage of the SOA lifecycle—from development and QA through production use. AmberPoint utilizes a policy-based approach to governance in order to manage the health and well-being of SOA applications. 

AmberPoint’s new architecture now offers agentless policy enforcement options in addition to existing agent-based mechanisms. AmberPoint delegates runtime policy execution to the SOA infrastructure whenever policy-capable infrastructure is in place, leveraging as much of the native policy execution capabilities of the runtime infrastructure as possible. As a result, enterprises realize greater returns on their investments in SOA platforms and runtime frameworks, while fully utilizing their SOA infrastructure.

"AmberPoint’s agentless capabilities represent a significant innovation in the SOA runtime governance market," said Jeff Browning, director of product management at F5 Networks. "At F5, we believe that an intelligent network working in concert with application services is critical to SOA success. AmberPoint’s rich integration with F5’s BIG-IP enables our shared customers to not only auto-discover existing BIG-IP policies and correlate them with AmberPoint policies, but also to update and create policies from within AmberPoint’s management framework. The result is a better integrated SOA infrastructure delivering increased runtime management efficiencies."

With this fundamental enhancement to its architecture in place, AmberPoint will be able to release expanded functionality and support for many additional application servers, appliances, ESBs, and other SOA infrastructure in the months ahead.

Agentless Policy Enforcement:
* Capability-based Delegation of Runtime Policies: Not all infrastructure and platforms are created equal—their runtime execution capabilities and policy support vary. AmberPoint is flexible enough to easily adapt to the different types of capabilities across varying components.
* Fire-and-Forget Policy Rollout: AmberPoint guarantees the delivery of each policy in an automated fashion by tracking the runtime infrastructure and facilitating management of the SOA system as a whole.
* Transparent Support across Platforms: Recognizing that standards for SOA management are evolving, AmberPoint transparently maps runtime policies onto both platform-specific and standards-based interfaces and protocols.

Benefits:
* Greater ROI from SOA Infrastructure: Ensures optimized execution of SOA runtime governance policies by leveraging built-in platform capabilities.
* Streamlined Administration of Runtime Policies: Instead of administering each policy individually, users can now govern the running SOA environment in an end-to-end fashion.
* Visibility of All Policies System-wide: AmberPoint delivers a single, comprehensive view of all SOA runtime policies across the environment. Users can see what policies exist, where policies are being executed, which services are using them, the policy status, etc.
* Uninterrupted Runtime Governance: Seamlessly enforces runtime governance regardless of hardware and software.
* Business-centric Policy Decisions: Removes concern for infrastructure from decisions about runtime governance.

"Our agentless enforcement is an outgrowth of our close relationship with the leading SOA infrastructure vendors, and reflects our commitment to helping our customers reduce the time-to-ROI with SOA," said Sean Fitts, chief architect at AmberPoint. "We’re pleased to introduce agentless enforcement and its many benefits to the market."