Vision Software Inc, a privately-held Oakland, California software house has taken its relationship with IBM Corp one or two steps further and now plans to work with IBM to integrate Vision’s Jade e-business automation system into IBM’s WebSphere 3.0 application server advanced edition. In addition, Vision will integrate IBM’s Visual Age for Java into its product and also tapping IBM to translate its products into nine new languages. The two companies signed a marketing agreement last year that will continue. However under the new agreement, in addition to the joint development, Vision will also sell WebSphere through its direct sales channels and distributors.
Vision has morphed Jade from an early Java development tool to a business rules engine, although VP marketing Mike DeVries says it still does some basic Java editing for event code and the like. However, the big advantage with business rules, he believes, is the ability to change tack rapidly, which today’s dot com companies need. He says traditional integrated development environments (IDE) take more time as code has to be changed.
DeVries says Vision especially wanted to get together with IBM for its Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) technology, but he says it’s also an indication that IBM recognizes that there’s a much larger market beyond those who simply want to code EJB.
This is a pretty big deal for Vision, which has grown to 170 people now from 70 a year ago and is set for 350% annualized growth this year, having added 80 customers up to this point. Version 5.0 of Vision Jade logic server including the IBM technology will be out early in the first quarter 2000 and the company is in the process of raising another round of financing, news of which should be forthcoming in about a month. The company raised $11.2m in January this year. Vision’s server software starts at about $25,000 per CPU.
