TSI International Software Ltd is making a play for the burgeoning business to business e-commerce integration space, announcing a new product based on its acquisition of Novera Software Inc in October. Wilton, Connecticut-based TSI is effectively bringing together its flagship Mercator transformation engine, which enables back office integration, with Novera’s web application integration technology to enable companies to integrate their legacy and ERP software with web based front office applications.
But rather than just focus on intra-enterprise integration, TSI is positioning the combined product, B2B integration broker, as a tool to enable companies to participate in on-line trading communities and marketplaces by integrating supplier and customer applications over the internet.
There are currently 480 of these marketplaces, but according to TSI’s VP of marketing (and ex-Novera CEO), Dave Power, that number is set to increase to 5,000 in the next three years. TSI wants to exploit that market, Power says, and become the dominant player in the B2B integration space. To that end, TSI is aiming the product at enterprises that want to set up their own marketplace to connect their suppliers and partners, and at the companies running the large established marketplaces already.
Until now enterprise customers have largely dealt with their suppliers over private, EDI (electronic data interchange) connections, but Power says the growth of the internet, the emergence of new data interchange standards, such as XML, and the emergence of electronic marketplaces are forcing businesses to change their e-commerce strategies. Marketplaces in particular are becoming a more and more important place to find customers and suppliers, Power said. They’re not all coming to businesses’ doors anymore.
When it ships in the first quarter of next year, the integration broker will enable companies to take any data, be it front or back office based applications, and web enable it by exposing and transforming existing business process interfaces as XML messages which can be sent exchanged between trading partners. The broker supports new and legacy e-commerce data exchange types including EDI, CII, SWIFT, HL7, ACORD, SAP and PeopleSoft. In addition to enabling companies to integrate their applications for e- commerce, Power said the broker product will also provide end to end management and monitoring support for the B2B integration processes.
Moreoever, Power says, at the moment there’s no one vendor to offer anything similar. I don’t believe the traditional EDI vendors have figured out the world of the web yet, he said. The EAI vendors don’t have the internet experience or the internet enabling technology that Novera brings to the table, and the emerging pure play XML vendors lack any ability to do transformation to existing applications. For that reason, he claims that TSI’s offering is unique and well ahead of its competitors, something that they would doubtlessly all dispute. Certainly, one look at the EAI market today and it’s obvious that business to business integration is certainly the way every vendor is headed.
At least one analyst we spoke to said she was impressed with TSI’s moves. They do have a good story and I think it’s a story that customers will really appreciate, said Kimberley Knickel, an analyst at Boston-based AMR Research. Customers are constantly hearing about trading exchanges, portals, application servers and integration servers and they don’t understand how you make all of that work together. I think this product from TSI will go a long way to helping that address that.
