Though the details are still sketchy, the news of the collaboration was confirmed by executive vice president of products, David Clarke. Yes, we are working with Infosys, he said. We are exploring ways in which perhaps commodity integrations could be hosted in ‘the cloud’ [i.e. online].
Clarke said that although it is early days to know exactly what might come from the collaboration, it is possible that what he called commodity integrations could be offered in a hosted fashion. For example, adapters that handle integration between the SWIFT financial interface and SysML, the domain-specific modeling language.
Clarke said that it is highly unlikely that all of the functionality of the firm’s Cape Clear 7 ESB Platform could ever be delivered in a hosted fashion or as he puts it, in the cloud. This is not going to work for the more value-added type of integrations that Cape Clear 7 will be used for, he said.
Specifically, the Cape Clear 7 ESB Platform can handle transport, routing, transformation, mediation, quality of service, security and standards support; as well as above that having business activity monitoring or BAM; BPEL orchestration; and service enablement through connectivity, adapters and service hosting.
Our View
The collaboration with Infosys has the potential to lend some credibility to Cape Clear’s claim, when it launched version 7 of its eponymous ESB in mid-March, that it enables on-demand integration.
The firm made the on-demand claim based on its assertion that Cape Clear 7 takes the ESB concept to new levels of scalability, reliability, and fast time-to-market. None of those are specific to on-demand or hosted software, however. Similarly, just because it is able to point to a handful of hosted software companies that use its ESB, it doesn’t mean that its ESB is any more suitable for on-demand than anyone else’s.
In fact, far more credible in Cape Clear’s marketing armory than the on-demand positioning is the recent publication of an Intel benchmark that saw its ESB 7 Platform achieve 37 million transactions in a day, and 5 million active instances, on an 8-way Xeon cluster. Those who thought that ESBs are a far more lightweight approach to integration compared to more traditional brokers, or that the BPEL standard is not ready for prime time, will have been rather surprised by such a benchmark.
