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Playing With The Pure Plays


The new world order of general-purpose application servers is taking on the entrenched integation giants

By Jennifer deJong
October 15, 2003 —  (Page 1 of 4)
Back in 1999, developers on Andy Miller's team had a major integration challenge on their hands. To keep up with Corporate Express Inc.'s rapid growth, they had to enable the company's critical applications to carry out key business processes, minimizing the need for paperwork and phone calls. To fulfill orders, the ERP application needed to communicate effectively with warehouse management and a host of other systems. To cement relationships with repeat buyers of its office and computer products, Corporate Express needed to forge direct connections with customers' procurement systems-updating multiple systems on each end.

To address the company's integration needs, Miller and his team did what most developers would do: They began writing point-to-point interfaces between the various applications. But they quickly discovered that wasn't the answer. "It was painfully obvious that [the connections] were fragile," said Miller, vice president of technical architecture at Corporate Express. "The applications were so tightly coupled that when you change [one or the other of them], you break the interface."

Like many development managers facing increasingly complex integration projects, what Miller was after was not simply the ability to establish a connection and exchange data. He needed a way to enable each application to play its individual part in carrying out a complex business process, such as placing and fulfilling a customer's order.

"You need to drive a process for customer synchronization across all systems," said Paraic Sweeney, vice president of marketing for WebSphere business integration at IBM Corp. "And you need a consistent way to do that."

In any company, a customer order involves many steps that typically span multiple systems, departments and employees. "You take customer orders on the front side. You make requests, check inventory, notify accounting, send an acknowledgement to the customer," said Todd Martin, director of product management for Vitria Technology Inc. At the same time, you need to refill inventory, interfacing with suppliers and with manufacturing, he said.

APP SERVER OR PURE PLAY?To integrate applications from a workflow and business process perspective, Miller turned to the webMethods Integration Platform, from webMethods Inc. For five or so years, the pure-play business integration software vendors, including webMethods and Vitria, had the business integration software market to themselves, said Roy Shulte, an analyst at Gartner Inc. He also counts SeeBeyond Technology Corp. and TIBCO Software Inc. among that group.

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