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December 6, 1999

ERP Vendors Move Into The Integration Market
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Enterprise application integration specialists insist ERP vendors lack one quality they say is essential to the integration game: neutrality. "What is impossible for an ERP vendor to supply is independence," says Kate Mitchell, senior VP of marketing and business development at STC.

Mitchell says STC has a library of more than 500 adapters for mainstream applications, including those from Baan, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, and Siebel Systems. The vendor sees its job as connecting any and all applications, whereas ERP vendors, Mitchell says, will naturally put their products at the center of any project. "We are the Switzerland of software companies; we work with everybody," says Fred Meyer, VP of product management at Tibco.

For their part, Baan and Oracle make no bones about partiality to their platforms and say vendors such as STC and Tibco fill a different niche. They say, first and foremost, they're offering integration tools for their own applications. "We don't believe we're in the EAI business. We're in the business of selling apps that integrate very well with both Baan and non-Baan apps," says Rocky Gunderson, senior VP of product management at Baan.

Oracle is also remaining friendly with enterprise application integration players. In fact, the company will incorporate application adapters from STC and TSI Software Inc.'s Mercator data transformation product to round out its own offering. It also maintains a close relationship with EAI provider Vitria Corp.

For Baan customer Phillips Plastics Corp., a manufacturer of industrial molded plastics in Eau Claire, Wis., tools to ease ERP integration couldn't come soon enough. The company is working with consultants to tie its Baan manufacturing and accounting suite to custom-built bolt-ons, PeopleSoft payroll and human-resources applications, a quality-control package, and an EDI suite from Harbinger. Craig Mey, VP of manufacturing services, is concerned that the more custom coding and third-party interfaces he adds to the Baan deployment, the harder it will be upgrade the suite. "If there were tools to ease that and help us stay on top of the upgrade path, we'd certainly look at them," Mey says.

SAP is in a camp of ERP companies, including PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards, whose integration strategy is to improve the routes in and out of its applications rather than introducing new middleware tools to the market. "We have no intention of selling EAI tools," says Robert Res, director of E-business technology at SAP. "It's partnering we're interested in, because the EAI market is already well-established."

J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft, and SAP are working on several fronts to make their systems interoperate more easily with third-party software, focusing for the most part on adding more APIs and building support for standard messaging formats such as COM/DCOM, Corba, and XML into their software.

Whether ERP vendors can address a company's integration needs may depend on how central ERP is to an organization. 3Com's Schultz says ERP may not be the heart of every operation and remains unconvinced that ERP providers can offer truly independent middleware to such companies. "ERP vendors are all making a mistake by trying to fill niches that other companies already do really well."

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