News

SeeBeyond boasts of Web services support in new tools

• By Rich Seeley
• October 15, 2003

SeeBeyond Technology Corp. (www.seebeyond.com), Monrovia, Calif., is emphasizing its commitment to XML standards for Web services, including UDDI 2.0, in its Integrated Composite Application Network (ICAN) Suite 5.0.

"Any of our adapters connecting to legacy systems expose their functionality to the rest of the suite through a Web services paradigm," Alex Andrianopoulos, SeeBeyond vice president, told XML Report.

Speaking from SeeBeyond's annual customer conference in Las Vegas this week where ICAN 5.0 is being unveiled, he maintained that his company is ahead of competitors in employing standards, including the Web services Business Process Execution Language (BPEL).

"When we create business process models, the underlying logic is BPEL," Andrianopoulos said. "We are the only integration vendor at this point, at least, with a BPEL tool that not only generates BPEL, but also executes BPEL."

SeeBeyond's products also adhere to the Java standards for J2EE platforms, including BEA WebLogic and IBM WebSphere, and make use of the little-used UDDI standard for Web services.

"The EJBs that we deploy -- which can execute any kind of business logic the customer wants -- those EJBs expose themselves as Web services," he said. "We then store their interfaces in our UDDI repository. Our meta data repository is UDDI-based, supporting UDDI 2.0 and exposing all the meta data through a standard UDDI layer."

Andrianopoulos said the use of UDDI makes it possible for customers to share integration technology among divisions within the enterprise, as well as with partners outside.

Richard Tanner, senior director for the e-business operations at Group Health Inc. (GHI), a New York City-based health insurance company (www.GHI.com), praised the ease with which the new SeeBeyond tools can be used to complete integration projects. Working with a pre-release version of ICAN 5.0, he said it took just five days to complete a pilot project for handling record updates.