Integrating The Incompatible Draws $5M For Metis

Despite the billions of dollars spent on IT every year, integrating applications and business processes remains a major challenge for most companies. Metis Technologies, which offers software to integrate disparate applications and databases, last week raised $5 million in second-round funding from Newlight Associates and Tobat Capital. The New York company developed its Metis Collaboration Platform peer-to-peer integration technology for the Audit Bureau of Circulations to audit Web sites. Metis also has customers in the financial-services, telecommunications, and insurance industries.

Metis is a player in a market full of vendors of data and enterprise application-integration software and services, including Sybase, Tibco, webMethods, and IBM (with its middleware products and recent acquisition of CrossWorlds Software). Metis' advantage is that its protocol-neutral technology requires less custom programming than competing offerings and provides built-in business-process monitoring, says senior VP Mitch Davis. "You get a lot of scalability out of this peer-to-peer technology," he says, noting that the Metis Collaboration Platform is being installed at an undisclosed customer site to link 750 different applications and databases.