Candle Corp’s efforts over the last two years to move from being a systems management company, to being a middleware vendor, has led it naturally into application integration. But now Candle has adopted the term business integration to describe the next step in its product and services evolution – a shift in which Roma plays a part. The idea of business integration is to join together what the company calls ‘business components’, or put simply the concrete everyday tasks businesses perform (such as making or confirming a sale) and tying them to application components. Part of the appeal of business integration is that it involves services and consulting work that Candle will perform in part itself, but also through partnering with systems integrators. In order to sell Roma as a business integration tool, Candle needs to improve a number of features common to application integration, in the areas of error handling, change management protocols and security. Candle is also considering adapting Roma, currently designed for finance and insurance, for other vertical markets, such as retail and manufacturing, as well as expanding it horizontally to work with supply chain management and ERP. In the near future the company also intends to add systems management. Further plans involve expanding Roma to include SAP business components – which boils down to wrapping SAP components so that they look like, and can work with, Roma. The company will follow this up with similar work on Baan’s ERP system, as well as the FedWire system. The need for all this new technology, as well as the services and consulting staff to help implement it, means a number of acquisitions are afoot before the end of the year and into next year. Other pieces needed to complete the puzzle include the ability of Candle’s products to cope with the web, particularly in areas such as response time, a hole that the company recognizes and plans to plug, probably through acquisitions. Within three years the company would like middleware to account for one third of its revenues, up from current rates of 15%. The company, however, which claims to be both profitable and have zero debt, has no plans for an initial public offering. One reason the company cites for not going public is the freedom that lack of shareholder pressure has given the company to pour money into re-positioning itself over the last two years.
