WebSphere Business Integration Takes Aim At New Markets

IBM says it's expanding its WebSphere Business Integration software to help users in the automotive, electronics, utility, banking and financial-networks industries move closer to being on-demand businesses.

The $225,000 integration software sets are also aimed at the chemical, petroleum, health care, insurance, pharmaceutical, retail distribution, and telecommunications industries. The 11 added markets bring to 36 the total of industry-specific integration frameworks offered by IBM.

Marie Wieck, VP of WebSphere Business Integration, says each offering provides a software framework in which to model how industry-unique business processes flow across a company's operations and to its business partners. The framework then helps integrate those processes by connecting them to in-house applications or those of partners and customers.

"This is actually a hub-and-spoke approach," Wieck says. The framework uses IBM's MQ Series messaging middleware as a core to connect different applications by exchanging messages. The messaging middleware sends a message and ensures the sender of its receipt by sending it again, if necessary, until it receives confirmation of delivery. To transform the format of messages, users can tap IBM's WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker, just upgraded to version 5.0.

Business Integration Message Broker used to be called MQ Integrator Broker. It transforms the format of a message "in flight," so that it may be delivered to an application using a different messaging format from the originating application. Integration Message Broker 5.0 is available now starting at $98,000.

IBM has also upgraded WebSphere Business Integration Event Broker 5.0, formerly known as MQ Event Broker, which is capable of capturing and responding to real time events occurring in applications. Event Broker is available now for $37,000.

The Australian Open, one of tennis' four Grand Slam events. uses Event Broker and Message Broker to capture changing scores on multiple courts and deliver frequent updates to subscribers on the Web, Wieck says.