A week after BEA Systems added integration to its WebLogic platform, SeeBeyond Tuesday made its biggest technology overhaul since 1999 with the newest version of the SeeBeyond Integrated Composite Application Networks Suite, v5.0.
SeeBeyond Senior Director of Corporate Marketing Richard Cramer said the revamped suite features an openness heretofore absent from the application integration suites created by competitors such as webMethods, Tibco, and Vitria. In a departure from the modus operandi of creating proprietary integration systems, SeeBeyond is answering the customer demand for open systems to gain trust in its revamped platform.
Simply, IT teams can now assemble applications built upon existing systems and infrastructure even if the infrastructure has been crafted using application servers and portals from competing vendors — built in different development environments.
Cramer said SeeBeyond is going right for the core of what it and many industry analysts believe is the evolutionary point of the EAI space, namely, convergence. The maturation of EAI; the commoditization of application servers, acceptance of portals, and progression of Web services, Cramer argued, are all paving the way for a new breed of business integration: one where disparate platforms and heterogeneous environments work together.
On the latter score, the new products may all be viewed as Web services and the suite relies heavily on business process standards such as ebXML and Business Process Execution Language for Web Services.
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Even analysts have noted the change.
“The eAI market is going through significant upheaval,” commented Nick Gall, senior vice president & principal analyst, Meta Group. “The biggest change is the movement toward standards, including J2EE and emerging Web services. Any vendor who does not fully endorse and adopt these standards will not be able to compete.”
That’s what SeeBeyond has done with SeeBeyond Integrated Composite Application Networks Suite v5.0.
The cornerstone product is the eGate Integrator 5.0, an integration platform that supports open portability of integration logic across common application servers. The eInsight Business Process Manager 5.0 is a business process management solution that supports process simulation for activity cost-based analysis and Web monitoring. eXchange Integrator 5.0 is an application that defines trading partner profiles and protocol management for B2B interoperability. It supports ebXML as well as provide the industry’s first tool for supporting all open protocols as well as any user-defined proprietary trading protocols.
eXpressway Integrator 5.0 is an application for the speedy packaging and distribution of integrations. Integration providers are fond of adapters, too, and SeeBeyond does not disappoint. It released the eWay Intelligent Adapters 5.0 suite, a line of more than 80 pre-built adapters for common applications and datastores. Lastly for the retooled suite, the eIndex Global Identifier 5.0 is a patient indexing solution that makes Web-based access and user configuration possible.
Cramer also discussed six new products from his firm. These tools address newer, more specialized areas of business integration and include data quality management, workflow and business activity monitoring. It even includes portals for creating Web and wireless applications.
Specifically, these new products include: eVision Studio 5.0, an application for enabling the rapid design and generation of interactive Web and wireless applications without any programming, creating the business interfaces which overlay composite applications and workflow management; eView Studio 5.0, an application for designing and generating “single view” applications for matching and indexing user defined business objects such as customers, businesses or products that are not uniquely identified across all enterprise systems.
The suite also includes eBAM Studio 5.0, a tool for designing and generating Business Activity Monitors without programming; ePortal Composer 5.0, a portal generation tool providing aggregation of any Web-based channel with content personalization and administration services; eTL Integrator 5.0, an extract, transform and load technology optimized for large record set and build data scenarios; and eInsight Enterprise Service Bus 5.0, a limited edition of eInsight built on a Web services-based architecture that uses BPEL4WS and UDDI to coordinate enterprise Web services. This Enterprise Service Bus edition provides a less expensive alternative to deploy composite applications built on a services-oriented architecture.
SeeBeyond Integrated Composite Application Networks Suite 5.0 will be phased over the next four months, with the cornerstone product, eGate Integrator 5.0, shipping to customers before March 31.