Bridge Pointe Software Inc, one of the smallest and least known of the large pack of vendors offering Enterprise Application Integration software, has become of the sector’s first casualties. Bob Ney, the founder and CEO of the Pleasanton, California-based company, was reduced to answering the company’s telephones yesterday, and said he expects the company to close its doors for good in the next several weeks. He said that Bridge Pointe will fulfill one or two key integration projects, one of them at the United Parcel Service, and will complete the final stage in the development of its BE4 middleware product. After that, the technology will be sold to the highest bidder, he said.
Two EAI vendors and one other company are interested in buying the BE4 technology for between $4m and $8m. Ney is well known in Silicon Valley as an experienced manager who can turn round companies or prepare them for sale. With Bridge Pointe, he says that he had wanted to avoid giving away equity to the venture capitalists who have often used his services in the past. In retrospect, he says, this may have been a mistake. Bridge Pointe was under-funded compared with rival EAI vendors, and made few sales. BE4 is unusual in that it is primarily used to read data from legacy applications and integrate them on the desktop; it does not attempt the more complex two-way real-time integration that other products are intended to achieve. The increasing success of more ambitious EAI projects may have contributed to Bridge Pointe’s downfall. á
