Blue Titan Software Inc. has released two new products that extend the reach of the company's service-oriented architecture tools.

San Francisco-based Blue Titan on Monday announced the release of Network Director RM 3.5 and Network Director 3.5.

The new versions represent the sixth major release of the Blue Titan Enterprise SOA Fabric and support reliable messaging and services compatibility, company officials said.

Network Director RM 3.5 supports the WS-ReliableMessaging specification and other features including JMS (Java Message Service) bridging. JMS bridging enables users to incorporate any proprietary messaging backbones they may be using into the overall SOA. The product features support for Tibco EMS, IBM's WebSphere MQ, BEA Systems Inc.'s WebLogic JMS queues and others, company officials said.

Sam Boonin, a vice president at Blue Titan, said, "We realize we aren't the only game in town when it comes to messaging backbones. There will be a great deal of heterogeneity. Enabling reliable messaging over HTTP is an absolute requirement."

Benefits of the Blue Titan approach include delivery assurance, lower cost of implementing an SOA and standards adherence, Boonin said. It is also noninvasive.

Boonin added that early users of the Network Director RM product are using it to connect applications to their messaging backbones and services-based enterprise information systems. One customer is using the Blue Titan technology to extend its reliable messaging backbone to Web services-based applications being developed on early versions of Microsoft Corp.'s Indigo communications subsystem.

Click here to read more about Microsoft's Indigo.

Meanwhile, Network Director 3.5 enables users to create enterprise services networks for sharing and controlling SOA applications.

Network Director 3.5 features service mediation; standards-based registry access, with support for WS-MetadataExchange, XPath and RSS; and protocol transformations, Boonin said.

"Blue Titan is tackling a few of the 'knottier' problems of making SOAs work, and is expanding well past their original roots in Web services management to solve issues around how to make distributed services work in a reliable, managed, and platform-independent way," said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, of Cambridge, Mass.

"In particular, this latest batch of releases provides significant and deep support for a number of emerging specifications, including WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Addressing, WS-MetadataExchange and WS-Security. The product also now allows users to build SOA infrastructure that bridges message bus technologies. Finally, the product includes a customizable, extensible registry—something that companies are increasingly looking for in their SOA infrastructure."

This article was first published on eweek.com.