By William Fellows
Software Technologies Corp is heading for e-commerce country and says it has re-architected its DataGate suite of application integration programs to support more distributed e-business application environments, changing its name to Egate in the 4.0 release of the product to be announced this week.
The primary motivation according to CEO Jim Demetriades is to offer customers a cheaper, more scalable, manageable, reliable and net-centric way of connecting application than conventional hub-and-spoke architectures. DataGate was a prime example of that topology agrees Demetriades, but so are the application integration frameworks offered by STC’s chief competitors New Era of Networks, TSI Software, Vitria Technology and Active Software. This model is now obsolete, according to Demetriades, who’s claiming to be able to demonstrate a significant return on investment within the first year of implementation of the $250,000-up product.
STC claims Egate, which has been three years in the making, is more suited to exchanging data between corporate applications with web-based e-commerce programs. In contrast to the hub-and- spoke-centric DataGate, Egate comprises Eway servers which provide connections between applications. Think of Eway servers as distributed versions of DataGate, STC says. They can be resident on a single server or reside individually on multiple servers. Each Eway server reads incoming data streams it has subscribed to, a process STC likens to reading email. The server routes the data to its intended destination and executes the business logic associated with a particular action. STC claims Egate can process 10,000 messages per second.
A database registry service is automatically updated with the transaction activity of each Eway server which is in turn replicated to other Eway servers which are subscribe to the same message feeds. STC says each Eway server can support IBM, Oracle or STC message queuing protocols. Business Object Brokers also featured in Eway servers handle the business rules, inbound and outbound performance and communications. A control layer takes information from Egate’s GUI through which users connect applications using process, component and collaboration editors and passes that to the database registry.
STC claims beta customer Amdahl Corp has integrated 30 applications using Egate. It says Hewlett-Packard and Barnes and Noble are also using the software. STC says it is still on track to IPO; I can’t hold on much longer, says Demetriades, who says he has already lined up the banks he will use. Claiming to be nearing a run rate of $100m, Demetriades says the longer I wait the less of the company I have to sell. He expects to record revenue of around $20m in the fourth quarter, up from $10m in the first and $16m, last quarter. He claims STC will add about 200 customers this quarter. รก
