With the suspected adoption of Web services and a consolidation underway in the enterprise applications integration space, the industry is morphing fast.
Two EAI vendors, Tibco Software Inc. and webMethods Inc., are taking steps to differentiate their integration technology with Web services offerings.
Tibco, known for its bus architecture middleware, will announce on Monday its BusinessWorks platform that will provide an entry for companies to turn integrated business processes into to Web services.
Arch competitor webMethods, of Fairfax, Va., announced today that the latest version of its namesake integration platform is now Web services enabled.
The new functionality in webMethods Version 4.6 addresses three issues that company officials see as crucial in the adoption of Web service: the ability to exploit Web services as part of an enterprise business process management environment; the ability to guarantee compliance with service-level obligations between provider and subscriber; and combined support for emerging standards like SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and WDSL (Web Services Description Language).
Tibcos platform also looks to extend Web services creation the enterprise, but takes a slightly different tack. BusinessWorks scales down EAI for the masses – those industries that havent necessarily adopted enterprise-wide integration; provides a console to manage the integration lifecycle process; and offers support for SOAP, WSDL and Universal Description and Discover Integration.
The BusinessWorks platform provides a modeling and configuration interface for fast deployment and training. It also offers process templates and out-of-the-box connectivity with third-party applications, according to officials at Tibco, in Palo Alto, Calif.
The Unified Administration console offers a Web-based administration interface that enables real-time monitoring of systems and processes across a distributed environment.
BusinessWorks supports Java Messaging Service and Java 2 Enterprise Edition.
The webMethods 4.6 integration platform with Web services support is available now. Tibcos BusinessWorks platform will be available next week.