By William Fellows
Having encountered Corba distributed object networks at approximately 10% of its customers, Software Technologies Corp has created a version of its DataGateway EAI enterprise application integration software that enables legacy applications to exchange data with object environments.
STC has bought in Inprise Inc’s VisiBroker object request broker to create DataGateway for VisiBroker, which carries a $50,000 to $125,000 ticket. STC CEO Jim Demetriades told ComputerWire that DataGateway could plug into Iona’s Orbix or other object request brokers but that there hasn’t yet been any demand.
He finds it ironic that STC, an integration company, is coming along to fix Corba ORB integration problems. After all it was only three or four years ago that ORBs were being touted as the answer to all integration problems. UBS, supposedly the world’s largest Corba user with nearly 700 servers rigged up, had to talk to STC because Corba hadn’t solved its integration problems. Corba is simply not succeeding as a be all for integration. It’s just one of a handful of solutions. STC says it expects the instances of Corba among its customer base to rise gradually, but says it comes across just as many requests to support other ‘standard’ connections including ANSI X12 and UN/Edifact.
STC says it’s quickly reducing its dependence on revenue from sales of its software to the healthcare industry. It says more than 50% of its revenue came from non-healthcare markets last quarter. It expects to do between $65m and $70m revenue this year, up from $36.5m last year. It says it has won 12 more financial institutions as customers this quarter and having added 64 new customers last quarter, expects to add in the region of 75 to 80 this quarter.
While current EAI solutions are being applied to conventional client/server network applications, we expect the next big thing to be EAI over IP. STC and other EAI players are already working on web/internet-based application integration solutions. There’s also likely to be a move to eliminate some of the confusion in the market by establishing a new name for this particular type of EAI.
