By William Fellows
Iona Technologies Ltd believes the real opportunity in EAI enterprise application integration is to connect packaged applications to programs written in-house using lightweight programming techniques, not the fat software peddled by pure play EAI ISVs.
Iona tracks Gartner Group’s belief that EAI is simply a part of platform middleware and that connecting front-end to back-end systems is the revenue opportunity. That’s where the majority of data and IT investment is. EAI is a subset of connecting middleware, it believes. The company estimates that 40% of its Orbix customers are using its distributed object oriented software to connect packaged applications.
As an infrastructure and development environment supplier, Iona has no designs on the market for business process integration EAI tools it believes are effectively applications in their own right. Moreover, in trying to position itself vis a vis EAI during a call which followed the announcement of an upbeat second quarter, Iona said a key challenge faced by its customers is sorting through the tangle of jargon. It thinks getting complex middleware built is now a fairly straightforward and well understood process. The challenge is getting it embedded into an organization.
Once the software is in place the supplier is into a 10 or 20 year relationship. Iona’s stock price is currwently languishing at around $17 after it missed its first quarter. Not messing up the second, is a good place to start, it said.
Iona believes the effort that Microsoft Corp is putting into promoting its Windows 2000 DNA and COM+ technologies as application server framework will put some of the pure play application server vendors in some jeopardy.
