Now hot on the application integration trail, Candle Corp says its Roma framework, a kind of ‘middleware glue’ that ties together and controls message queuing, directory and component services is now installed at 20 customer sites, ten of them in the financial services and three of them in production. Veteran banking IT director Kevin Scully, who recently joined Candle as managing director of Global Financial Industry Solutions from Candle partner New Era of Networks (Neon), says Roma now provides a gateway called FS/Access between IBM Corp MQSeries messaging to Swift (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), the banking industry’s global data exchange network. Moreover, he expects to generate a slew of follow-on business as Swift tries to attract new members of the brokerage industry – many of them Candle customers. Scully, who will shortly broaden his focus to Asia/Pacific markets in addition to US/Europe, expects to develop other Roma bridges directly to clearing banks and securities houses. In addition, there are supposedly three new OEM partners in the wings to be announced within 90 days. It counts IBM, TSI and Neon as existing Roma partners. It also expects to forge Roma links with a slew of other OLTP/ORB/messaging/publish-and-subscribe concerns; the likes of BEA, Tibco and Iona spring to mind. Candle has already picked up insurance industry executives to drive Roma into this vertical market and is scouting for other vertical targets. Candle believes application integration – middleware glue – is a killer application with revenue potential greater than database market. Candle is using revenue from its Command Center mainframe systems management cash cow to develop the integration products. Scully says 1999 will be the year companies begin to budget for appliccation integration rather than pilot small projects – recent Meta Group research finds only 12% of its clients are actually budgeting for application integration now – and agrees that $250,000 and up is the starting point for the kind of glueware offered by Roma.
