By William Fellows
In addition to its BusinessWare suite, Vitria Technology Inc says it now has a solution for doing very simple application integration. It calls the 2.2 release due in May, BlackJack, for the 21 minutes it claims users can tie a couple applications together. It doesn’t say how much BlackJack will sell for but it expects it will bring its average engagement price down from the current $400,000 mark. Vitria believes that in 1999 it will do way more than the 300% improvement it forecast over 1998’s $10m- odd revenue rate, claiming the first quarter has already come in well above expectations. It says it will be up to 250 people by year-end from 150 now and is burning through some $22m venture funding already amassed. It wouldn’t say if it’s going to go back for more but claims it’s had a steady stream of investment offers which value it more highly than any of its competition. It expects four or five of the remaining private EAI firms to be public within 18 months if not a year. It claims much of the competition is in any case still preoccupied trying to integrate the various pieces of their own integration solutions. Having built the stack itself, Vitria claims an 18 to 24-month lead over the competition.
With a claimed 40 customers, in addition to 10 in production now and ten others going live within a month, Vitria, like the rest of the EAI community, is fast trying to build out its relationship with the integrators. It’s all about becoming the de facto standard for an integrator, it explains. It expects that a $500,000-plus deal cut with with Cablevision through KPMG will bring it several other KPMG-lead engagements. But the big one, as it seems to be for all the EAI companies, is Andersen Consulting. It already has relationships with more than two Andersen practices and is all-but ready to unveil a new vertical industry strategy built around a product created for a large telco through Andersen. It claims it will be the biggest EAI industry deal to date when it’s made public. Electronic commerce is the other key opportunity it will target.
Vitria estimates that in the EAI consolidation, some specialists service providers will survive but also doesn’t know what the effect on the market will be when (and if) IBM, HP and the likes of BEA Systems finally manage to assemble complete middleware and integration services. The reason the enterprise application crowd themselves – which have directly caused the EAI boom – aren’t signing partners in the market or offering integration themselves, is mainly because they’d have to admit their components don’t work together, says Vitria. It’s also because they’re caught like deer in headlights: they don’t know what to do, Vitra claims.
Vitria is building its future on the ability to put people and processes together, to automate processes – manual IT based – and integrate workflow with on top of integration services, providing some intelligence on top of events. At the moment the EAI industry is doing little more than performing data synchronization services, it says. BusinessWare includes connectors to applications and other middleware, data transformation, asynchronous messaging, process management and analysis with security, naming, transaction management, publish and subscribe, metadata and administration services. It uses IDL or XML to represent data.
