News

At Gartner Summit: Software AG debuts integration portfolio

• By Rich Seeley
• May 17, 2004

Software AG is looking to move deeper into the legacy integration space with its XML Business Integration Portfolio, which the company debuted at the opening of the Gartner Application Integration and Web Service Summit in Los Angeles this week.

Seeking to leverage its high-volume transaction processing lineage and its more recent expertise in XML database development, Software AG’s Portfolio product is designed to help companies integrate legacy systems into Web services applications, according to Bill Ruh, CTO and senior vice president at Software AG.

The Portfolio consists of three packages -- an Enterprise Legacy Integrator, an Enterprise Service Integrator and an Enterprise Information Integrator. The Enterprise Legacy Integrator transforms mainframe and legacy data into XML and logic into Web services for integration using a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). It includes more than 140 adapters to enterprise applications such as SAP, Oracle, Siebel and others.

The Enterprise Service Integrator provides an enterprise service bus (ESB) that uses XML messaging to connect IT assets exposed as Web services to create composite applications. For example, said Ruh, a credit collections agency could use it to bring together information from a variety of skip tracing Web services into a single application on an agent’s desktop.

The third package is the Enterprise Information Integrator, which provides a gateway that delivers a single view of data from multiple systems. Ruh offered an example of how this works for Software AG’s call center customers. “Where I want to get a single view of a customer and I don’t want to have to go through multiple screens, the Information Integrator allows information from multiple databases to be collected together and aggregated into a single view in real-time. Rather than creating a new database where I suck all the data out of every system and try to come up with a new data model, we create a virtual database and integrate using Web services to all the back-end databases. This allows us to create in real-time a record of a customer or any other attributes.”

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