Web application integration company Novera Inc has added support for IBM Corp’s MQSeries, DB2, Oracle8i and Allaire ColdFusion in a 4.6 release of its products now renamed Novera Integrator and Manager from its jBusiness Management Suite. Novera says its value proposition is being able to link multiple application servers and front-end systems to back-end mainframes, databases and packaged applications.
Novera says that developers can now write components that communicate with existing MQSeries applications and can access these components from MQSeries clients. The components can be exposed to the network as XML, Java servlets, EJB, JavaBeans or Visual Basic. Its software ensures that the right components interact with the right message queues. It doesn’t do MQSeries administration per se. Novera already supports IBM WebSphere and Sun NetDynamics web application servers and says it counts IBM and BEA Systems as its closest competition. Prices begin at $30,000.
Novera doesn’t agree with Meta Group’s view that application server and integration markets are destined to converge over the next couple of years around products which provide a layer of core application services. Meta says the lack of integration services in application server toolkits makes it more difficult to build integration enabled applications. Novera says it expects to strike relationships with EAI vendors for access to their connectors which extract data from packaged applications and make it available to other programs. It believes that tiers of integration services will be layered on application servers, but not plumbed in directly.
Novera also expects to play further up the chain with products that offer higher-level application and component assembly. It says it’s using the $11m it won in a third round of venture funding to build out its marketing and product strategies. It says it has no current plan to hold an IPO.
