Startup AptSoft Corp. is readying software that its officials said takes a new approach to application integration.
The Burlington, Mass., company this week will release its Director software, which uses a technology designed to automate business workflows. Rather than relying on hard-wired code or middleware, Director helps companies integrate applications at a business-process level. Director uses Web services standards to create a service-oriented architecture. Customers can use this architecture to tap existing logic and applications and turn them into reusable components, officials said.
As a result, users can assemble and reassemble components from existing applications—and use those components to integrate data and existing business rules into business processes.
Director has two modules: AptSoft Director:Data, for component development, and AptSoft Director:Interactions, for business rule assembly and maintenance. Director:Data is a Windows-based C++ application that enables users to examine their enterprise data and create objects that are common to all systems in the enterprise but also specific to a companys business. The net effect is a bridge spanning the syntactic and semantic differences between databases and data stores, officials said.
Director:Interactions is a Java-based server that receives application events through message queuing systems and remote procedure call mechanisms such as Simple Object Access Protocol and CORBA, whereby events are evaluated to determine if the event and its associated data satisfy conditions to generate an action to a receiving application.
Deb Ryley, vice president of IT at Circle Company Associates Inc., a loyalty management and online concierge service provider, implemented Director as an event-driven integration system that triggers a business process. “AptSoft is like a surgical strike,” said Ryley, in Boston. “It sits on top of everything that we do here, and we chose how we want to abstract our applications that we can send to different systems. So youre abstracting your systems and saying, On this event, I want this to go there, and the system will catch it, and it does all the logging and queuing. Its a nice fit for someone like us.”