The Mindreef Coral Platform Hosts Collaborative, Multi-role Tools
for Governing, Testing, Diagnosing, and Supporting Web Services
Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Summit - Orlando - December 5, 2005 - Mindreef®, Inc.
today announced Mindreef Coral(TM), a Web services lifecycle
collaboration platform for organizations building Web services and
service-oriented architectures (SOAs). It enables individual users,
service teams, and service consumers to collaborate and share
information, regardless of role, skill set, or development environment.
“SOA is impossible without effective collaboration,” said Anne Thomas
Manes, vice president and research director at the Burton Group. “SOA
is all about collaboration and reuse. There are few significant
technical hurdles to SOA adoption; people-oriented issues are the
challenge. A lot of people think problems can be solved with
technology, but they are not taking into account the organizational and
cultural issues."
Mindreef Coral addresses the challenges of SOA collaboration by
supplying teams with servers that can be linked together. Each Mindreef
Coral server acts as a hub housing Web service data and containing
XML-aware tools that allow team members to govern, test, diagnose and
support Web services collaboratively. Mindreef Coral’s tools are
available to various roles including architects, managers, business
analysts, developers, testers and support staff and enable roles that
do not have deep XML or programming skills to perform tasks that
previously required more technical skills.
Mindreef Coral is based on the usage data and the real-world
experiences of thousands of users of Mindreef SOAPscope®, the company’s
award-winning diagnostic tool for Web services. Development teams at
Wachovia, Fidelity National Financial, Charles Schwab, and other
companies use Mindreef products to successfully build, test, and
maintain effective Web services and SOAs.
“In moving to a Web services-based SOA, we've quickly seen the need for
more formal communications as our service teams become more
distributed,” noted Chris Brown, Vice President, Retail Senior
Integration Architect at Wachovia Corporation. “Mindreef Coral provides
us with a highly intuitive platform that makes it easy for team members
to work collaboratively as they design, test, and support our services.
We have developed a dependency on the platform as our major testing
suite for our Web services initiatives.”
“As customers move beyond single Web service deployments into
meaningful SOAs, one of their primary challenges is to break down
organizational silos and communicate effectively across disparate teams
– XML is a good language for developing services, but not for
communicating with people,” said Frank Grossman, president and founder
of Mindreef. “We designed Mindreef Coral to help everyone in the
service oriented lifecycle communicate effectively, share important
information, and contribute to the Web services development experience,
while growing their SOAs efficiently and pragmatically.”
Mindreef Coral – A Central Platform for SOA Collaboration
Mindreef Coral includes a powerful set of extensible tools for IT professionals who operate at the XML software layers:
Foundational Governance – Enables all team members to
participate in the governance process. Multi-role tool support allows
corporate architects to codify organizational policy and author custom
rules. Project architects, developers and testers can easily check for
compliance as services are built and tested. Support and operations
staff can easily check for compliance causes when problems arise.
Multi-role Testing – Enables all team members to
perform tests that are most meaningful to their roles. This includes
functional and regression testing, as well as quality, interoperability
and conformance to organizational and industry standards.
Collaborative Diagnostics – Enables service team and
community users to collect and share all the elements of a Web service
for problem analysis. Coral includes a first-to-market Web services
simulation tool for prototyping Web services; prototypes can be run
stand-alone or before the Web service is built.
Lifecycle Support – Mindreef Coral’s community view
helps prevent support issues by exposing service contracts in a form
that makes them easy to understand and investigate. When problems are
reported, Mindreef Coral eliminates misunderstandings and finger
pointing by making it easy to assemble and communicate a complete and
platform-independent, reproducible scenario that includes all relevant
XML artifacts, a script and simulation data if necessary.
Mindreef Coral’s tools operate on Mindreef shared workspaces (MSW).
MSWs let users encapsulate and share Web service data with hi-fidelity
and completeness. Besides Web services artifacts like WSDL files and
SOAP messages, an MSW can contain a playable script, simulation data
and descriptive notes. MSWs can be shared across teams, or with the Web
services community at large using Mindreef Coral’s community portal.
Collaboration is the Key to Scalable SOA
Customers have been using an early release of Mindreef Coral since May
2005. Usage data shows that companies are growing from service-enabling
a few tightly coupled integrated systems, to broader strategic service
oriented initiatives. Mindreef customers and industry analysts confirm
that SOA cannot scale without better collaboration – underscoring the
need for a platform that meets the communication needs of Web services
teams and service consumers throughout the entire lifecycle.
“Service orientation introduces technological, organizational and
cultural changes in the way that IT and business work together,” said
Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst, ZapThink. “Leveraging Mindreef’s
leadership in Web services diagnostics as a foundation, we see a
tremendous value in Mindreef Coral as a service lifecycle platform.”
Mindreef Coral Pricing and Availability
Mindreef Coral is available for purchase on a concurrent-user license
basis. Pricing starts at U.S. $999 for a Coral Server that includes the
base system components and two-user licenses. Additional user licenses
can be added as needed for U.S. $499 per year. The platform runs on
Windows XP Professional or Windows Server 2003. For more information,
contact Mindreef at sales@mindreef.com at (603) 465-2204, ext. 510, or visit the company’s website at www.mindreef.com
About Mindreef
Mindreef, Inc. is a leading provider of tools and platforms for the
development of Web services and adoption of service-oriented
architecture (SOA). Mindreef products enable business analysts,
architects, application developers, testers, operations, and support
staff to build, deploy, and maintain software for a SOA. More than a
thousand customers worldwide are using Mindreef’s products. Mindreef is
a private company, venture backed by Kodiak Partners. For more
information, visit www.mindreef.com |
