Software Technologies Corp says it has filled out a complete message broker suite for integration enterprise applications with the addition of a home-grown publish and subscribe module to its DataGate suite called DataCast. Unlike other publish and subscribe models, STC says DataCast offers integrated IP multicast services, as well as data transformation. According to Lexington, Massachusetts-based WinterGreen Research Inc, which has published a voluminous tome on the EAI market, Tibco Software Inc currently leads the publish and subscribe space with a 57.4% market share in 1998 worth some $17.4m. Talarian Corp is next with 14.9% ($4.5m) and Level 8 Systems Inc with 6.3% ($1.9m). With STC saying that DataCast can be unbundled as a standalone publish and subscribe engine it will be going head to head in competition with these companies. DataCast tracks the state of every transaction and doesn’t rebroadcast to every subscriber in the event that one or more don’t happening to be listening at the time. STC claims it now offers synchronous, asynchronous and public and subscribe messaging. Publish and subscribe is just one segment of an EAI market that has a varying number of components depending on who is talking. WinterGreen defines five kinds of engines (including publish and subscribe) in the message broker space plus a further set of EAI framework components. STC, other EAI companies and Wall Street brokerage Bear Stearns for example divide the market up in other ways. STC says it’s also important to bear in mind that 85% to 90% of industry does not use packaged applications. It believes the EAI market comprises adapters; queuing and storing mechanisms; business rules and collaboration tools that match inbound message to the destination package; transaction processing (STC says its DataGate has its own TP technology or can use third party work); distributed, multithreaded, multiprocessing technology; and a graphical environment. This quarter it will add native DB2-CLI and DB2/400 support for mainframe and AS/400 access.
