In response to BEA Systems Inc’s launch of its M3 object transaction broker on Tuesday (CI No 3,423), IBM Corp says its own Component Broker is generally available today and is already with more than 25 customers, some of whom are beta customers but others who are full paying customers. While BEA said it did see Component Broker as a competitor to M3, Alistair Rennie, IBM marketing executive for Component Broker, says IBM has yet to see full details of BEA’s offering, which, he claims, it had been keeping tightly under wraps prior to the launch, and is not sure whether it offers all the functionality of Component Broker. However he admitted the two rival companies share the same vision. He says Component Broker is running absolutely to the schedule IBM announced in January, when it released version 1.1. It released version 1.2 in April, and 1.3 was scheduled for the summer. Rennie says this will be ready earlier than expected, in late July or early August, and version 2.0 is on track for the first quarter next year. Component Broker already supports Java business objects and Java language, and the summer release will see support for Enterprise Java Beans. BEA has said M3 will not have Enterprise Java Bean support until at least the autumn. Rennie also points out that IBM worked very closely with Sun Microsystems Inc on the Enterprise Java Bean specification, which was approved at the JavaOne conference in March (CI No 3,373), and says it is therefore architecturally simple for Component Broker to support.
