News

At Gartner Summit: Jacada joins the Navy

• By Rich Seeley
• May 19, 2004

Providing a case study in the use of XML Web services for internal integration, Jacada Ltd. unveiled a new tool for 'fusing' applications during the Gartner Application Integration and Web Service Summit held this week in Los Angeles.

The U.S. Navy is using the new Jacada Fusion product to integrate procurement systems, including legacy systems where the Navy does not have the source code, into a single end-user application, explained Rob Morris, vice president, product strategy at Atlanta-based Jacada.

Written in Java and implementing XML Web services standards, the new Fusion product represents a trend Gartner analysts are highlighting at this week's conference -- the marriage of Java and XML standards in Web services applications.

Jacada Fusion 'fuses all types of applications --Windows, Web and host-based,' Jacada's Morris told XDT. He said the product allows organizations to integrate a variety of legacy applications into a single view on the end user's desktop. By eliminating the need for a customer service representative to navigate between multiple applications, often requiring the re-keying of account numbers, this type of integration provides a substantial productivity gain. In the Navy example that Morris was highlighting, he said it is estimated that the integration will save 'nine person years per year.'

In the case study, the U.S. Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC) used Jacada Fusion to integrate legacy apps for a contracts administration process that manages more than $6 billion in annual contract awards, Morris explained. The process is labor intensive, as managing billions of dollars in government contract requires 'tens of thousands of contract actions' each year, he added.

Before the integration project, routine work on solicitation, award and modification of contracts required Naval personnel to re-key the same data into a variety of legacy applications running on different platforms -- 'mainframe, Web and Windows,' Morris said.

With the productivity gained from eliminating redundant data entry and navigating between different applications, the Navy estimates that the integration project that took four months to complete will pay for itself in six months.

More information on Jacada is available at http://www.jacada.com/.

For more Gartner conference coverage, please go to http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=9188