InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
April 5, 1999
Enterprise App Integration ThrivesConstellar, Convoy roll out offerings
By Jeff Sweat
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he enterprise application integration market saw heavy activity last week, as two vendors introduced new products and a coalition of vendors disclosed their intention to create industry standards for application integration products.Constellar Corp. rolled out Constellar Hub 3.0, which adds support for IBM MQSeries message-queuing. That gives users the ability to handle both batch transfers, which Constellar says make up 80% of interapplication traffic, and real-time messaging.
Convoy, formerly a data-conversion software company, has added technology to its Convoy/DM 3.0 product that will help IT organizations build interfaces between disparate enterprise applications. Whereas previous versions of the product focused only on one-time projects--moving data from legacy and packaged applications to PeopleSoft applications--the new product will let users set up permanent connections among applications. It will handle the transfer of data from an application such as PeopleSoft to legacy applications, business analysis and reporting tools, and others--and vice versa. It will also use IBM's MQSeries as a messaging mechanism to help link applications.
Rockwell Automation in Milwaukee, an industrial-automation company and a division of Rockwell International Corp., chose the software primarily for its ability to tie closely with PeopleSoft's applications. "The integrity it gives you by mapping directly into the PeopleSoft data is almost zero errors," says Gordy Klindt, regional manager of Montclare Technology Partners, the consulting firm that's handling Rockwell's efforts to link data from legacy applications to a PeopleSoft system. He adds that Convoy is well-suited for developing permanent interfaces because the technology stores interface logic, so programmers don't have to repeat the work they've already done. It also contains technology that lets IT managers change multiple interfaces at once when an integrated applications is changed or upgraded.
Constellar Hub 3.0 is available immediately, starting at $100,000. The MQSeries connectivity Toolkit is sold separately for $50,000. Convoy/ DM 3.0 is available immediately, starting at $32,000 per server.
Constellar also formed a standards group with more than 20 vendors, including BEA Systems, Bluestone Software, CrossWorlds Software, Frontec, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, New Era of Networks, Oracle, and Vitria Technology. The Enterprise Integration Standards Council is a standards body that will attempt to form technology standards that meet the business needs of both customers and vendors.
The standards are badly needed in the burgeoning market, analysts say, where about 30 vendors are trying to solve the application integration problem with disparate technologies. But that wide range of technology, as well as the complexity of the application integration problem, make a standards-based approach to integration difficult.
"There's an infinite number of connection possibilities in the enterprise application space, so there's a limit to how much you can impose a standard," says Joshua Greenbaum, president of Enterprise Applications Consulting. "The moment you have an agreement on workable standards on enterprise application integration, you're going to wipe out most of the companies doing EAI."
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