Paul DiLeo, CEO of the Cambridge, UK-based company, said that the evolution of SOA meant that companies deploying them now require security, performance, optimization, and traffic management, all of which Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager, ZXTM, can offer.
He said it would sit in the logical space of the Enterprise Service Bus, so that when a transaction comes in, going first to a web server and then a SOAP server, the multiple transactions that will then be generated can all be optimized. He said ZXTM is the only traffic management technology currently certified by BEA Systems Inc and will become increasingly important as they move into the AquaLogic space, referring to BEA’s data-integration offering.
He said Zeus’s competitive advantages for playing in the SOA world are: first, we’re a pure software product, even if we can deliver on a server or an appliance; second, we have that flexibility of delivery for whatever back-end infrastructure the SOA has, and third, our existence as software makes us nimble enough to keep up with the still-evolving SOA protocols, as there are no standards in place yet in that market.
Zeus will also seek to leverage the fact that it can already deliver ZXTM as a virtual machine via a partnership with VMware Inc. That makes the VM just another delivery mechanism for the product alongside Blades, servers, and appliances, but down the road it should make it easier for ZXTM to fit into a virtualized environment and perform its functions there.
Zeus recently released the latest version of the ZXTM software, v4.1. The most significant development was the addition of a rate-shaping capability, as well as a new appliance, the 7400, with significantly higher throughput than previous models.
