By William Fellows
Riding a wave of optimistic market forecasts and swelling customer lists, the EAI enterprise application integration community is scurrying towards the market. Buyers clearly want internet stocks and Wall Street thinks they’re going to snap up EAI stocks too. Over the last few months the major brokerages’ sell-side technology operations have begun coverage of the EAI market. Active Software Inc is the latest to put itself in the running. The 90-person company has raised $25m and says it won’t be looking for any more venture capital money before it seeks a listing. Replying to Software Technologies Corp CEO Jim Demetriades, who managed to disturb a hornets’ nest among the EAI crowd when he gave readers his appraisal of the state of the market (CI No 3,576), Active CEO and founder Jim Green says his company has 80 customers, not the 30 Demetriades claimed. Moreover he says, Active is also one of the companies Andersen Consulting is examining in its review of EAI products. He doesn’t believes STC has a corporate relationship with Andersen yet and like Extricity Software Inc, figures the revenue and installed base Demetriades claimed for STC means it must have a low selling price. Green says Active operates in more tiers of the EAI technology space than most other EAI ISVs (CI No 3,577); Extricity, which provides high-level integration, uses Active’s adapters. Green expects 1999 will be characterized by pragmatic enterprise software spending. Instead of handing over huge sums for one-size-fits-all ERP and supply chain solution businesses will be more inclined to take existing applications and use EAI to glue to make parts of those applications work together. Integrating legacy applications with new programs is Active’s speciality, Green claims. Moreover Active is not concerned with application development Green notes: The problem is too many applications already. The emphasis of initial EAI projects is to make things work together. Then the goal is make them easier to use and faster. Although Active is a recipient of venture funding from the Java Fund, Green is at pains to point out that only 40% of its work is Java-related.
