Software AG Systems Inc (or SAGA), the Reston, Virginia middleware firm, this week unveiled its new application integration software, promising a reduction in programming integration times by up to 80%. SAGA, the company spun off from German internet-business specialist, Software AG earlier this year, claims that its Sagavista middleware is the only product in the market that lets companies integrate all their different systems – ERP custom, legacy, packaged and database applications – without having to undergo hours of complicated reprogramming. We’re betting our company that the product will be able to do it, said David Linthicum, SAGA’s CTO, It doesn’t exist anywhere else. He added, Current enterprise application integration solutions are limited and monolithic. They are based on hub-and- spoke architecture offering little scalability or flexibility. They also increase the risk of single-point failure. Linthicum said that Sagavista overcomes this problem by offering many-to- many points of integration, so if one system goes down, the whole system doesn’t fail. The Sagavista product family consists of the Sagavista Integration Server, a message broker that acts as the brains of the system, connecting the applications together and enabling communication between the different systems; the Sagavista workflow wizard, an easy to use drag and drop tool that reduces application integration time by up to 80% and the Sagavista Solutions-Ready Adapters. The latter are the interfaces that link into a company’s applications. SAGA said it expects to include adapters for linking SAP R/3, IBM MQ Series, iXpress, EntireX, RDMBS and CICs in the first version of Sagavista. By introducing the software, Linthicum said SAGA was attempting to create a new middleware space, called solutions-oriented middleware, whereby the software adapts to fit the existing applications rather than the other way round. The product, formerly codenamed The Amadeus Project, is currently in limited alpha release with 24 organizations and is due to go on sale in the first half of 1999. It will be sold by SAGA in the US, Canada, Israel and Japan and by Software AG throughout Europe. Pricing is expected to start at $300,000, for the mainframe (OS/390) version, but SAGA said there would versions of the software available for NT and Unix by the end of 1999. SAGA was created when Software AG sold the majority of its US business to Thayer Capital for $150m in 1996. Software AG still holds 9% of the company, and Software AG CEO, Dr Erwin Konigs remains on the board.
