Next-generation application governance from AmberPoint takes an Agile approach to governing distributed applications, with four themes: self-propelled, unified policy enforcement, open, and incremental.

The challenges with current governance approaches are that they're focused on a central database. "Current governance approaches operate under the misguided assumption that if you feed enough information into the system, out of that will spring governance," says Ed Horst, chief marketing officer for AmberPoint. Users complain that governance is too heavy and inflexible, excessively manual, limited to Web services, and has "enterprise pricing, which usually means a big upfront fee - even if you want to start small," Horst notes.

AmberPoint Governance System (AGS) addresses those complaints by offering continuous discovery of application components and resources - automatically. It also features policy enforcement across both application and system layers, flexibility in an open architecture, and low-cost deployment.

"It starts collecting metadata automatically," notes Dhruv Gupta, AmberPoint's VP of product management. "Instead of forcing customers to manually enter information into the governance system, it starts automatically discovering it."

The unified policy enforcement is not limited to any one component or stage in the lifecycle. "From a single vantage point, you can specify components of various kinds," Gupta notes. AGS automatically applies policies on a continual basis.

The open governance architecture was built using a dynamic platform, Gupta says. It allows users to see from one console what's going on in the environment.

Reuse and contracts are other key aspects of the product. Users can promote reusable assets to multiple catalogs. AGS features customizable contract structures and negotiation models. The product also reports contract compliance and unauthorized use.

AGS's incremental approach allows organizations to "start small by setting up users, a team, a project, or the whole organization, and then grow from there," Gupta points out.

The incremental approach carries over into the pricing model, which is $5,000 per CPU per governance engine. The Governance Starter Kit starts at $25,000.

For more information, go to: www.amberpoint.com