E.piphany Offers Integrated WebSphere, WebLogic

E.6 CRM software will be packaged with IBM's WebSphere and BEA's WebLogic Web server software at no additional cost.

In a bid to make its software easier to integrate and buy, E.piphany Inc. will announce Tuesday a packaged integration of its E.6 customer relationship management software with IBMs WebSphere and BEA Systems Inc.s WebLogic Web server software.

The Web server software will be added at no additional cost, E.piphany officials said.

E.6 is a J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition)-based suite of sales, customer service, marketing and analytics software. E.piphany provides integrated WebLogic or WebSphere in lieu of its own proprietary application server, which it has discontinued.

The goal, company officials in San Mateo, Calif., said, is to lower customers costs of ownership and integration headaches while continuing a strategy of being "aggressively open" to industry standards. E.piphany has no plans to support Microsoft Corp.s .Net platform beyond interoperability, officials said.

Several other companies in the CRM space, including PeopleSoft Inc., Kana Inc. and Art Technology Group Inc., say they already offer WebLogic and WebSphere bundled and integrated with their software at no additional cost to customers.

"Vendors are continuing to recognize that building their own application servers is a non-starter," said Meta Group analyst Liz Shahnam Roche in Stamford, Conn. "Its good for the industry that companies are recognizing industry standards. So if youve trained your IT staff in WebLogic, they dont have to learn a new server environment."

Shahnam Roche said the biggest benefit of the open standards approach is interoperability between different vendors applications.

"You can enable process and data integration among disparate systems," she said.

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