RoadBlock Security Firewall
RimApp Technologies releases an intelligent network security appliance.
Janaya Reitz

September 15, 2004

RimApp Technologies, a specialist in software development, specialized IT appliance development, and network design and implementation, has launched the RoadBlock firewall appliance, which is based on the Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004. RoadBlock is an intelligent network security appliance that provides advanced application-layer firewall, VPN, and Web cache capabilities in a dedicated hardware security solution. A range of products will be available to suit both small- to medium-size businesses, as well as enterprise businesses.

ISA Server 2004, part of Windows Server System, is the stateful inspection application layer firewall, virtual private networking (VPN), and Web cache software solution that enables customers to maximize existing IT investments by improving network security and performance.

RoadBlock provides new levels of application protection; ease of use; and fast, secure access in a dedicated, cost-effective solution. It features comprehensive management tools such as RimApp's RDA WEB-UI (RoadBlock Appliance Web User Interface). This interface provides a secure, intuitive, and comprehensive management point that helps even the new-to-RoadBlock administrator learn firewall administration tasks quickly.

"Customers have told us they need cutting-edge solutions to help them contend with increasingly sophisticated and persistent attacks that target applications," said Steve Brown, director of product management in Microsoft's Security Business and Technology Unit. "Solutions such as the RoadBlock security appliance can help customers more easily and effectively protect their systems and applications against new and emerging threats."

The RoadBlock firewall includes security tools powered by GFI, a developer of messaging, content security, and network security software. These tools include e-mail antivirus and content checking; Web content checking; intrusion detection; and security scanning and patch management.

"RimApp's RoadBlock security firewall sets the bar for stateful application layer filtering firewall appliances," commented Thomas Shinder, Microsoft security and firewall expert. "The RoadBlock solution includes everything that firewall administrators expect from a firewall appliance: headless operation, secure remote Web-based administration, and easy setup and maintenance."

The Web interface provides centralized Web management for each ISA Server 2004 firewall feature. RimApp's RoadBlock Web-based administration tool makes complex firewall configuration tasks simple by using everyday language.

RoadBlock will be available in the third quarter of 2004 beginning at an estimated price of $2,300.

RimApp Technologies Ltd.
Tel: +44 (0)845 6585 003
Fax: +44 (0)845 6586 006
www.rimapp.com

IBM Unveils New Software Development Capabilities
IBM has announced plans for new capabilities that are expected to be available in the IBM Software Development Platform by the end of 2004. The new software development solutions are designed to help organizations innovate and increase their productivity by improving communication and automating the activities that span line-of-business, development, and operations teams.

At the Rational Software Development User Conference in July, Mike Devlin, general manager of IBM Rational, demonstrated these new capabilities during his keynote and discussed examples of companies that have innovated and gained a competitive advantage by embracing a business-driven approach to software development. Through business-driven development, organizations can improve their ability to achieve greater value from all their assets, including business processes, legacy systems, middleware, software components, and other intellectual property.

"By utilizing the IBM Software Development Platform to tightly link their business, development, and operations teams, clients can optimize business value, accelerate software development, and better leverage runtime platforms and IBM middleware," Devlin said.

Many of the new capabilities in the IBM Software Development Platform are based on Eclipse 3.0 technologies designed to provide a vendor-neutral framework for sharing development artifacts. These artifacts include requirements, models, code, test cases and defects.

The Eclipse framework reportedly can make it easier for vendors, including IBM, to integrate their products, providing development teams with access to hundreds of complementary solutions. It can also provide role-based user interfaces that enable team members to work in an environment tailored for their unique needs.

The new platform capabilities will support:

• JavaServer Faces (JSF), which provides components that enable developers to create highly interactive Web pages.
• Service data objects (SDOs) that enable developers to link applications to databases easily.
• UML 2.0 modeling that automates model-driven architecture efforts and can improve the integration between business, development, and operations teams by providing a common language to communicate more effectively.
• Realtime deployment to WebSphere, which speeds the time to deploy software to the application server.
• Visual refactoring designed to propagate architectural changes across the application automatically.
• An Eclipse-based development platform for the creation of C/C++ applications.

The platform will also offer wide area network (WAN) client support and expanded monitoring and administration capabilities within IBM software configuration management (SCM) solutions. With these new capabilities, IBM enables clients to more effectively capture, control, and manage software changes and assets from many development locations. This reportedly can help organizations control operational costs, reduce mistakes caused by lack of communication, and maintain a secure development organization.

IBM Corp.
1133 Westchester Ave.
White Plains, NY 10604
800-IBM-4YOU
www.ibm.com

NetManage Host Services Platform
The NetManage Host Services Platform (HSP) is a set of products and shared services that gives customers flexibility and speed of deployment when pursuing host-based business initiatives. Building on last year's introduction of the Host Access Platform, the HSP access, presentation, and integration software lets customers maximize host systems and build them into a service-oriented architecture.

"Organizations today are faced with accelerating business initiatives requiring levels of security, responsiveness, and resilience that exceed the capabilities of their IT infrastructure," said Zvi Alon, NetManage chairman, president, and CEO. "The highly flexible HSP solution has the ability to rapidly execute new host-based initiatives with components designed to work together, enabling a phased approach that fits within any IT constraint."

HSP supports the full range of choices that line-of-business (LOB) and IT managers need when designing and implementing host-based business initiatives. Examples of these choices include delivery channels for an application (desktop, PDA, other client types); the range of publishing methods such as PC-to-host, HTML-to-host, and object-to-host; and the full spectrum of host systems that might be accessed (IBM mainframes, IBM and Unix-based computing, and ODBC-based databases).

As NetManage customers have discovered, host-based business initiatives often grow more complex over time. Many enterprises first utilized host-based applications in the form of green-screen emulation. Those same enterprises might evolve and find the need to extract host-based applications in the form of objects that can be used and reused within a service-oriented architecture (SOA). HSP gives customers the opportunity to implement business initiatives of varying degrees of complexity—from simple (green-screen emulation) to complex (composite applications)—depending on their budget, time frame, and resources. With the opportunity to support a full range of host-based business initiatives, HSP simplifies these decisions.

"By offering customers a fluid platform with a common set of services, and the ability to mix and match platform components across the organization, companies like NetManage enable customers to leverage host system investments into newer technology initiatives like J2EE and .NET, rapidly transforming to a service-oriented architecture," said Cindy Borovick, program director of data center networks at IDC.

NetManage customers gain the ability to reuse and integrate applications and data running on host systems into new initiatives without interrupting their existing business processes. HSP provides graphical tools for developing applications and services for SOA, such as Web services, .NET assemblies, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), and other object types for consumption by new business applications.

Contact the company for pricing information.

NetManage Inc.
10725 North De Anza Blvd.
Cupertino, CA 95014-2030
408-973-7171
Fax: 408-257-6405
www.netmanage.com

The Open Group Sponsors IT "Declaration of Independence"
The Open Group—a vendor-neutral and technology-neutral consortium—has announced an industry-wide effort, with the support of IBM, to promote the use of open standards to give information technology customers freedom of choice and provide interoperability among all vendors.

The "Developer Declaration of Independence" calls for the adoption and protection of open standards by corporations, governments, organizations, and individuals to ensure a fair competitive marketplace, allowing all parties to compete equally from the basis of a shared technology foundation and framework.

"The Declaration is a call to action for software developers, business and industry, and all levels of government to publicly promote and defend open standards against the threats posed by proprietary architectures," said Allen Brown, president and CEO of The Open Group. "We hope everyone who has a stake in the success of open standards will sign the declaration and make their voices heard on one of the most important issues facing the future of the IT industry."

"As a key player in open standards and a strong proponent of their adoption, IBM is proud to support The Open Group in its efforts with the declaration," said Buell Duncan, IBM general manager of ISV and developer relations. "Open standards are at the heart of the next computing wave where disparate systems and platforms are integrated across the enterprise, and externally with customers, suppliers, and other partners. This end-to-end integration simply won't be possible without multivendor interoperability through open standards or with organizations being locked into proprietary systems."

You can read the declaration at http://www.opengroup.org/declaration.

The Open Group
44 Montgomery St., Ste. 960
San Francisco, CA 94104-4704
415-374-8280
Fax: 415-374-8293
www.opengroup.org

Parasoft Releases .Test 1.6
Parasoft, a provider of automated error prevention (AEP) software solutions, announced the release of Parasoft .Test 1.6, a unit-testing tool that automatically tests classes written on the .NET Framework without requiring developers to write a test scenario or stub.

The latest version of .Test offers extended support for NUnit to help development teams prevent errors and accelerate time to market for their Web services and applications built on the .NET Framework. .Test offers the flexibility to automatically generate scenarios that can be compiled and run in NUnit without setting up the NUnit test harness by hand. .Test can also automatically compile and run NUnit test cases in its own GUI.

"Parasoft continues to update .Test to make it the best unit-testing tool for .NET on the market, giving developers the ability to automate testing and spend more time developing," said Gary Brunell, Parasoft vice president of professional services. "NUnit is the leading open source testing tool for .NET, and now .Test 1.6 allows developers to generate NUnit scenarios without ever leaving the .Test interface."

.Test automatically performs a complete range of coding standards analysis and unit testing on .NET Framework assemblies. From traditional to extreme programming, integrating .Test into the development process helps prevent software errors and ensure that code is structurally sound, maintainable, and portable.

Test 1.6 is available for Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. .Test fully integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. Pricing starts at $900.

Parasoft
101 E. Huntington Dr., 2nd Floor
Monrovia, CA 91016
888-305-0041 or 626-256-3680
Fax: 626-305-3036
www.parasoft.com

Ivis Technologies Unveils NetBoost
Ivis Technologies, a provider of software solutions that increase application development efficiency for industry-leading platforms, announced the debut of NetBoost. NetBoost, a product providing functionality identical to the company's JBoost for Java, is an infrastructure application that manages the security, look-and-feel, and globalization (internationalization/localization) of applications, sites, and portals built with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework.

The solution offers an administration console that allows Web and security administrators to quickly and securely manage users, groups, roles, policies, and applications according to the enterprise's established policies.

"NetBoost lets software developers focus on business logic and other important programming tasks of .NET Framework-based projects, instead of the time-consuming, mundane, and repetitious tasks involved with 'looks, locks, and languages'," said Christopher Lank, CEO and president of Ivis Technologies.

NetBoost is designed for corporate developers, Internet service providers (ISPs), and independent software vendors (ISVs). The application supports a wide variety of Web-tier architectures including MVC2 and other custom approaches.

The product's security features monitor all incoming HTTP requests for file or application access, and ensure that proper user authorization control and policy-driven user provisioning take place before access is granted. You can apply security without having to invoke security protocols from within the user's Web application.

Ivis has also made available XBoost—a software solution that bridges the company's JBoost and NetBoost infrastructure applications. With XBoost, developers will be able to execute security, presentation, and globalization tasks between Java and the .NET Framework, while also creating ancillary benefits such as centralized and predictable data persistence and greater administrator convenience.

XBoost is a controller proxy that serves as a communications conduit. The application allows the features and functionality of JBoost and NetBoost to work together as a single unit. With XBoost, developers will be able to manage an ASP.NET-based Web application front end, site, or portal using JBoost on the back end; alternately, a NetBoost back end can manage a JSP front end.

A free Developer Edition of NetBoost supports two concurrent user sessions; the solution's Professional Edition, priced at $2,495, supports 10 concurrent sessions with additional license packs available as needed in 10-, 25-, 50-, and 100-seat options. Both Developer Edition and Professional Edition allow an unlimited number of processors.

Ivis Technologies
11201 N. Tatum Blvd., Ste. 110
Phoenix, AZ 85028
602-795-9240
Fax: 602-926-2348
www.ivis.com

Cape Clear 5: Enterprise Service Bus for SOA-Based Integration
Cape Clear Software has announced the availability of Cape Clear 5, the latest release of the company's enterprise service bus (ESB), which simplifies the integration of applications and data using service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services. Version 5 introduces multiprotocol routing and messaging, sophisticated data integration tools, extended support for building and scripting SOA and Web services, advanced enterprise management, BPEL-based composition and routing, and support for sophisticated security mechanisms, including digital signatures.

"Traditionally, the business potential of integration has been easy to sell, but hard to deliver," according to David Clarke, senior vice president of products at Cape Clear Software. "Integration has always suffered from 'over' syndrome. It's been over-budget, over-time, and over-promised, with all the risks kindly underwritten by the customer. The ESB changes the rules. Using the ESB, it takes only days to get integration projects up and running, it supports the technology you already have, and it enables you to deliver new services to your customers and partners using open standards. Now, the delivery is every bit as compelling as the sale."

Cape Clear 5 includes four integrated products:

• Cape Clear Studio provides a graphical environment for designing and developing integrated services.
• Cape Clear Server is a powerful Web services-based ESB for integrating applications.
• Cape Clear Data Interchange simplifies the integration of diverse data sources.
• Cape Clear Manager provides the tools required to manage and secure deployed Web services and integrations.

Cape Clear 5 features protocol-independent routing, messaging, and message transformation; sophisticated graphical data integration; enterprise management capabilities (such as SNMP and JMX interfaces); BPEL-based routing and workflow; extended security support (including support for HTTPS, SSL, XACML, X.509, SAML, JAAS, LDAP, and integrations with security infrastructures such as Entrust, Netegrity, and the Liberty Alliance); simplified SOA development; and rapid, automated technology and data integration.

Cape Clear 5 supports IBM AIX, Linux, Microsoft Windows 2000/XP, and Sun Solaris. Pricing for Cape Clear 5 starts at $20,000 per server.

Cape Clear Software
880 Winter St., Ste. 300
Waltham, MA 02451
781-622-2258 or 888-CAPE-439
Fax: 781-622-2378
www.capeclear.com

Gentleware Updates UML Tool
Gentleware AG has released version 2.5 of its software modeling tool, Poseidon for UML. Like the Enterprise Edition, which is the team version of the tool, the Professional Edition now offers a concurrent license mechanism. The customer can bind licenses to specific users or simply buy a number of licenses administrated by the license server without tying them to a user or a PC.

If a customer already owns some user-bound, single-user licenses and requires further licenses for a varied group of users, both license mechanisms can be combined. Customers, therefore, have the flexibility to use work processes to determine the number of licenses needed. If, for example, two developers work in turn on the same PC, one license is enough for both users.

One of the benefits of this license mechanism is that users can work with Poseidon for UML from outside the team (at home or on a business trip, for example), and can simply borrow a license from the license server. This licensing structure was designed to provide the best usage of the available resources and flexible deployment within teams.

"The possibility to combine user-bound licenses with the new concurrent licenses enables companies to set up their own ideal mix of both license mechanisms, which leads to great cost savings," said Jesco von Voss, senior software architect at Gentleware. "For example, savings potential of over 30 percent can be realized for a team of 10 UML developers, of whom only five require dedicated licenses." Contact the company for pricing information.

Gentleware AG
Schanzenstraße 70
20357 Hamburg
Germany
Tel: +49 (40) 24 42 53 30
Fax: +49 (40) 24 42 53 31
www.gentleware.com