If you’ve ever moved home and wondered why some pieces of snail mail from one company, say your bank, make it to your new address while others keep going to your old address even though you’ve filled in your new address details what seems like a zillion times, it’s probably because the bank has a whole bunch of address files for you in different applications and guess what? The applications don’t talk to one another.
By William Fellows
It’s this kind of enterprise application integration requirement which message broker company New Era Of Networks Inc is trying to solve with its NeoNet software. And New Era’s not alone – count Microsoft MSMQ Falcon, IBM MQSeries, Tibco, Active Software, BEA, PeerLogic, Level8 and Vitria among the other contenders. Messaging guarantees delivery and its asynchronous nature means it doesn’t have to wait on other tasks to complete. Roll-back – or system recovery – is provided by integration with synchronous transaction processing monitors like CICS and Tuxedo. It’s also touted as an ideal way of having incompatible Corba object request brokers – or the applications they support – communicate. Standards? Not! The Message Oriented Middleware Association tried and failed to get some general characterization going but the market – including heavyweights such as Intel Corp – believe IBM and Microsoft will set the de facto standards and the little guys will provide value-add touches and scoop up niches and vertical industry specials. The jury’s still out on how asynchronous messaging will eventually be fused with object application technologies such as Object Management Group Corba. It will likely take until the first wave of purists realizes that Microsoft is going to win whether or not they put their heads together that standards will progress. After all message brokers are often trying to clear up the mess left by companies’ ‘standardization’ efforts.
Closer integration with IBM, Candle
New Era believes that between 30% and 40% of all programming time is spent writing interface code, to cope with merger and acquisition activity, but more especially to connect internet commerce and intranets with back-end Cobol or C applications and send results back out to the web. Beyond back office headaches there’s electronic document interchange and many other kinds of application spaghetti to deal with, says New Era CEO Rick Adams, a former leading IT manager at Goldman Sachs & Co who realized the opportunities on offer for application interoperability and went off and started the company, hiring former Goldman Sachs colleague Harold Piskiel along the way as CTO. Piskiel managed the joint Goldman Sachs-Sybase Inc project that was sold to Sybase and became Sybase replication server. New Era does its queuing in the database and its publish/subscribe and data transformation rules are stored as a table, allowing traditional data analysis tasks to be performed on it. Object request brokers are good ways to build applications, Adams thinks, while messaging is a good way to communicate between ORBs and non-ORB applications. NeoNet provides a kind of generic object wrapper that enables various types of high-level languages to be mapped to each other and messages sent. The company is currently working with ORB house Iona Technologies Ltd to build a messaging-to-ORB bridge for Union Bank of Switzerland’s London operation with the goal of bringing distributed asynchronous services to ORB applications. Adams says the integration is difficult, especially developing the roll-back capability which the two are doing with Iona’s implementation of OMG’s Corba object transaction services. The scalability’s not well understood yet, Adams observes. IBM currently resells New Era’s rules engine as MQIntegrator and New Era and IBM are said to be discussing ways of providing closwr messaging integration services along with Candle Corp, whose Roma software architecture is designed to integrate applications that use multiple messaging products.
