Visual Edge Ltd is gearing up to attack the enterprise application integration market on the back of its successful SAP- to-Corba work with other tools and utilities based upon its core ObjectBridge COM-to-Corba translation engine. Visual Edge, which hasn’t yet announced plans to support other ERP packages, claims 10,000 ObjectBridge seats and believes the market for application integration solutions is going to be vast. The SAP software provides R/3 developers with the ability to use Object Management Group Corba components in addition to Microsoft DCOM. ObjectBridge is also used by BEA Systems Inc to link its ObjectBroker request broker and Tuxedo OLTP to Microsoft COM environments. BEA is also fitting ObjectBridge to its the new M3 suite of integrated products. BEA says ObjectBridge will enable developers to write client applications using Microsoft COM common object model and ActiveX components that can communicate with M3 on the server. M3 includes the Tuxedo and ObjectBroker and support for Enterprise Java Beans is coming soon. Quebec, Canada-based Visual Edge has a COM-on-Unix license from Microsoft with which it will enhance ObjectBridge in a subsequent release. Visual Edge says it still does a significant amount of business on the UIM/X interface builder for which it is perhaps best known. It’s surprised how little fall-off in revenue from UIM/X it has experienced.
