While the joint development, marketing and sales agreement was only announced on March 1, the deal was actually signed before Christmas, ComputerWire has learned, and members of Software AG’s design team have been working in Fujitsu’s California offices since then. By this summer the companies say they will be ready to unveil the suite of modules. The suite has not yet been given a name.
Taken together, the companies believe that the suite will take them ahead of competing platforms from IBM, BEA, and Tibco, which according to Software AG’s Jonathan Airey, vice-president of XML business integration, do not have tight enough linkages between business process management and services-oriented integration.
The companies define SOA as a standards-based organizational and design methodology for redesigning business systems and applications to more closely align with the functional processes of the organization.
According to Airey, there are a number of modules that will form the SOA platform suite. These include Fujitsu’s Interstage Business Process Manager, and Software AG’s Enterprise Service Integrator and Enterprise Information Integrator products, for enterprise service bus-based integration and real-time information access. These are existing products, but the companies are jointly working on integrating them.
There will also be a completely new product called Integration Metadata Repository, which will provide the necessary categorization, versioning, and discovery of web services and other integration elements required in a service oriented architecture. It will support the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration standard, which helps with the discovery of web services, but according to Airey, will go much further than that. UDDI doesn’t tell you everything you need to know to leverage those services, for example how to prioritize between services, access methods, and how to make best use of them, he said.
IMR will use Software AG’s Tamino database as its repository, but this will be embedded and not need to be licensed separately. The suite of modules is expected to support Windows and Solaris version 9 initially, with additional platforms added later in the year.
