News

Xignite Splices Web Services

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• February 19, 2008

Xignite Inc., a provider of component-based financial services software, this month will roll out a hosted offering that will let corporate developers build and share composite .NET-based Web services.

The new platform, called Splice, will let developers mash existing Web services -- such as those that call for generating a quote and a currency rate -- into composite Web services. According to the San Mateo, Calif.-based company, such composite services can be the core pieces to building advanced services-oriented business apps used by key decision makers within organizations.

What's noteworthy about Splice is that enterprise developers can create and/or gather Web services hosted by Xignite, whose so-called cloud-based offering is an alternative to an enterprise services-oriented architecture (SOA), says Gartner Inc. analyst Anthony Bradley.

"The value of your SOA is completely dependent on the number of good source systems that you have that are services-enabled, and that's a big effort," Bradley says. "This allows you to access services across the cloud, not just services from [internal enterprise] systems."

Making Mashups
Currently Xignite has 50 core Web services that can be used with those of other third-party sources regardless of what protocol -- XML, SOAP, REST, RSS, JSON -- they support. The mashups can also support those of third-party apps including Salesforce.com Inc., SAP AG and others, says Stephane Dubois, Xignite's CEO.

"Splice is a Web services mashup platform that lets developers create composite Web services from other Web services, thereby reducing integration pains," Dubois says. "You can basically do it on-demand, speeding development and increasing the firm's agility."

Mashups have recently become associated with the development of presentation-layer Web applications consisting of combined data sources into one integrated tool. Xignite's mashups aren't focused at the presentation layer but rather on what Dubois describes as "supply-side" mashups.

"If you need to do some work to combine a bunch of Web services to power an application, you don't necessarily have to do all of that inside your code," Dubois says. "In our new platform you can offload that and do it on-demand, therefore getting business agility and being more responsive."