By William Fellows
EAI enterprise application integration vendor Extricity Software Inc claims it has 43 licensed customers, not the single one claimed by Software Technologies Corp CEO Jim Demetriades (CI No 3,576). Moreover, Extricity says that if someone like Demetriades – whose company does low-level data transformation – can so misrepresent the EAI market and its technology basis, then this cannot reflect very well upon STC. Extricity says it plays at the opposite end of the market from STC and deal sizes are typically $300,000 to $400,000. STC told us it has around 1,200 sites and revenues of around $40m which means its average install price must be around $30,000-plus. Extricity says its Alliance suite (now at release 2.0) connects supply chain applications and tightly integrates businesses with their suppliers. Most supply chain vendors and ERP vendors, where they are integrating applications, are typically only using the internet to provide a web interfaces and external links to their applications. Extricity says Alliance enables users to build and manage shared processes. At the next level down there are vendors such as CrossWorlds and Vitria Technology which couple internal processes to adapters. Below this type of infrastructure the plumbing starts to get low-level. The likes of Active Software can integrate multiple adapters; the Neons, STCs and TSIs provide data transformation and messaging; while Tibco and IBM with MQSeries are pure transport plays. Integration spans from low- level data transformation (this is what STC has done in the dental office community) to business-to-business integration – connecting customers, partners, suppliers and their disparate applications together. This is the world of Extricity. The requirements are very different than gluing Vantive to SAP and not understanding these differences – as a vendor – shows the basic lack of understanding about this market and its requirements. Extricity counts the likes of Tibco and Vitria as partners and integrates supply chain solutions from the likes of i2, Manugistics and Chesapeake. It offers pre-packaged adapters to link most of the major applications in this space, supports most middleware and provides and application development framework. Its value proposition is supporting the emerging extended enterprises over the internet. By 2002 Forrester estimates the e-commerce technology market will be worth $1.6bn. $200m of that will be business-to-consumer infrastructure the rest is business-to-business. Extricity counts SAP, Baan, Intel and Cambridge Technology Partners among its investors and will seek an IPO. Ken Ross, founder of Ross Systems and former CEO of Documentum Inc has 60 employees and is targeting revenues of $10m a this year 1999. Its customers include Adaptec and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing.
