SeeBeyond builds EAI platform

Integration software specialist SeeBeyond has developed a new enterprise application integration (EAI) environment, emphasising its support for open standards across the board.

But analysts remain sceptical that being standards-compliant is enough.

The Integrated Composite Application Networks (ICAN) Suite 5.0 is the result of $130m research and development investment over three years. It relies heavily on web services and other open standards.

ICAN provides application development and business process management (BPM) capabilities, including an enterprise service bus, while assuming that the enterprise will be running multiple operating environments.

Ian Howells, vice president of marketing at SeeBeyond, told vnunet.com: "You can give your whole stack top to bottom to BEA [WebLogic], IBM [WebSphere], Microsoft or SAP, but nobody is happy doing that.

"Much better is to write something that can run on BEA today and IBM tomorrow, and use the existing infrastructure."

He added that enterprises would build what they need for the future onto existing systems.

According to analyst Meta Group, the EAI market is going through upheaval driven by standards such as Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and web services.

"Any vendor which does not fully endorse and adopt these standards will not be able to compete," it said in a statement.

SeeBeyond also identified maturing EAI, application server commoditisation and increasing portal functionality acceptance as factors driving its ICAN approach.

Tony Lock, senior analyst at Bloor Research, said: "Standards are a wonderful idea, but some of these are reasonably fluid and certainly juvenile. There is still a lot of wiggle room, so this could be a problem."

He warned that SeeBeyond not being a large company might also affect take-up.

"Enterprises are interested in the long-term viability of a company. Is the technology so interesting that someone will acquire it?" he asked.

Among the new or updated products forming ICAN are:

• eGate Integrator 5.0 - a J2EE 1.3 integration environment for developing and deploying Enterprise Java Beans and Message Driven Beans.
• eInsight BPM 5.0 - a web-services-based BPM product to create workflow applications.
• eInsight ESB 5.0 - a lower-cost alternative to BPM supporting a service-oriented architecture.
• eVision Studio 5.0 - for design and generation of interactive web and wireless applications without programming.
• eView Studio and eBAM Studio - to create user-defined business objects and business activity monitoring objects respectively.
• eWay Intelligent adapters - 80 pre-built J2EE Connector Architecture adapters for common applications and data stores that expose the applications as web services.