By William Fellows
New Era of Networks Inc is targeting the non-IT buyer with a new package of application integration services designed to capitalize on the cult of e-business. Neon believes that as lines of business groups within companies are compelled to get on line, they will turn to software that will enable them to link new and legacy applications and present data to other internal applications as well as a company’s web-based commerce systems. It thinks theses buyers are less interested in the platform and technology than the value proposition and competitive advantage that integration software can deliver.
Neon’s $100,000 E-Business Integrator includes very little newly developed software. Instead it has pulled together pieces from its existing suites and with some discrete services it had been using in the field. It has hung a new set of non-IT names on the components to better reflect their functions; move, route, transform, enrich and bridge. The suite is effectively an extension of Neon’s enterprise process executive product and includes the basic Neon rules, formatter and web tools. It is claimed to automate the integration of business processes that span applications. It is also building in connections to XML, CommerceOne, application servers, Broadvision and EDI (its EDI format loader is based on SpecBuilder from Edifecs). The suite is on NT now and it will go up on Unix and mainframes if there’s demand.
To circumvent some of the bad publicity that traditional enterprise application integration EAI attracted when Neon’s stock price exploded a couple of months back, EAI, boosters in the market research companies are euphemistically calling the work internet application integration or business community integration. We like the Yankee Group’s description of e-business that it’s really nothing more than message routing done properly.
Meantime, Neon is rubbing its hands with glee at the rash of support for XML. Microsoft, IBM and the rest of the XML supporters are sure to implement different dialects, meaning more integration opportunity. After all it’s not the language itself, it’s what words are used and what they mean. Neon also believes that the increased use of packaged applications plays into its hands as well as the migration of EDI, used by 99% of the Fortune 500 companies, on the internet.
Unlike Meta Group, Neon doesn’t believe that integration and application servers will become rolled up into single server platform products. But then it wouldn’t as it doesn’t want to be in the application server market. That’s a $7,000 ticket market. EAI is a $100,000 play, it said.
Neon is now working on devising a strategy to take advantage of the application service provider (ASP) market. ASPs outsourcing multiple applications to clients will provide a fertile revenue opportunity Neon thinks. It’s working through different revenue models (per message, per transaction) and says it is talking with potential ASP partners including Corio.
