Siebel Systems Inc. took a stab at easing application integration headaches Monday with the announcement of its Universal Application Network at its European user conference in Barcelona.
The new technology, first reported by eWEEK in January, is based on Web services and XML. It adds industry-specific business processes and support from such EAI vendors as IBM, SeeBeyond Technology Corp., TIBCO Software Inc., WebMethods Inc. and Vitria Technology Inc.
Its designed to reduce implementation times and development and support costs while breaking down walls between disparate e-business applications, Siebel officials said.
“Our customers have clearly communicated the importance of application integration,” said Tom Siebel, chairman and CEO of Siebel Systems, in a statement. “Rather than build a custom or proprietary solution, we responded by partnering with industry leaders to create the universal/collective/widespread standards-based, business process integration solution that reduces cost and complexity and enables customers to choose applications that best meet their business needs.”
There are three components of the UAN. The Business Process Library is a collection of prepackaged industry-specific business processes—such as Customer Creation or Quote to Order—delivered as Web services and XML APIs. The library also includes transformation maps to other vendors back-office systems as well as prebuilt process flows and predesigned common objects.
The UAN also includes a Business Process Design Tool for developers to build their own business process flows and transformation models.
Lastly, the UAN includes an Integration Server, which is a customized version of commercially available application integration servers like IBM WebSphere Business Integration, SeeBeyond Business Integration Suite, TIBCO BusinessWorks, Vitria BusinessWare, and WebMethods Platform. In the UAN, specific business processes required for the integration are added to these integration servers.
The UAN is expected to be available this summer.