InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
| September 29, 1997 |
CrossRoads Software: Link Competitors' Apps
By
Jeff Sweat
Based in the Silicon Valley town of Burlingame, Calif., CrossRoads was founded in April 1996 by Katrina Garnett, a former head of middleware efforts at Sybase Inc. In November, t
he company will come to market with "competitive linking" software. Simply put, competitive-linking software ties one application to another in corporations, regardless of whether they come from the same vendor.
ERP Is The Backbone
Several big industry players agreed with CrossRoads' vision and have signed on as financial backers. Among them are SAP America, PeopleSoft CEO Dave Duffield, Dell Computer founder Michael Dell, and an unidentified investor from Baan. That CrossRoads' backers helped create the enterprise applications market puts this startup in a unique position. It's singularly capable of working with top vendors, analysts and customers say.
CrossRoads' software joins disparate applications-packaged applications and cust
om legacy applications-through what the company calls processware or application collaboration. Business processes that begin in customer service or sales applications, for example, are passed to manufacturing and distribution modules, regardless of application.
There's a huge need to integrate applications this way, analysts say. "Every company that implements packaged applications has the requirement to make them interoperate somehow," says Joshua Greenbaum, an analyst with the Hurwitz Group in Newton, Mass. "Customers are crying for this kind of functionality. They've all been doing it, but doing it the hard way."
The hard way typically requires the IT group, or its systems integrator, to build complex custom interfaces that not only eat up resources and time but also become obsolete when a new version of the ERP application is released. "When it's custom-coded, with each release you only have more chances to get into more trouble," says Maynard Webb, CIO of networking company Bay Networks Inc.,
which, along with Hewlett-Packard, was one of the first companies to consider adopting CrossRoads' software. Both Hewlett-Packard and Bay are in early stages of implementation, although the product hasn't been released yet.
CrossRoads accomplishes the integration feat by employing a central, business process-focused server-called the InterChange Server-to translate between applications. A connector, made specifically for individual products, passes from the enterprise application to the object-aware InterChange Server, which is based on Sun Microsystems' Java programming language. The InterChange Server links via connectors to other applications. Those applications can be connected via a drag-and-drop management interface that lets IS managers graphically link business objects such as service billing and invoices.
Rather than treating its technology as middleware, CrossRoads is creating applications built around business processes. Its first offering, CrossRoads Customer Management, features modules
such as service billing, returns processing, order fulfillment, account status, and field service logistics. Follow-up applications will focus on employee management and the supply chain.
CrossRoads is not alone in this burgeoning market. Although the Hurwitz Group's Greenbaum says that no one has matched CrossRoads' flexible black-box approach, the company is faced with competitors from the tools and middleware markets, such as Oberon Software Inc., that have already shipped products aimed at application integration. More formidably, Baan's recent acquisition of Aurum included application-linking technology similar to CrossRoads', although Baan has yet to lay out plans for it.
But for now, CrossRoads' technology, backing, and marketing savvy have made it an impressive front-runner. "There aren't many places in the enterprise where I spend much time on startups," says Bay's Webb. "With this, I had such a need that I had no choice."
Timing, indeed.
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rossRoads Software Inc. has some good things going for it: compelling technology that links disparate enterprise applications at the business-process level, a savvy management team, and powerful backers. The company also has great timing. In a world where companies are rapidly moving their businesses to enterprise application frameworks while simultaneously juggling multiple platforms, good timing could be the greatest asset of all.
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