SOA apps meet reality

See correction below

How does a company no one has heard of end up on the cover of a national magazine? This is not a hypothetical question: Our cover story this week tells the tale of Rearden Commerce and its just-launched EBS (Employee Business Services), built entirely on Web services (see “SOA’s killer app unveiled”). Have we gone mad?

Well, it helps that EBS is one of the most elegant SOAs (service-oriented architectures) we’ve seen, solving the same identity-based services problem Microsoft attacked — and ultimately abandoned — with its HailStorm project. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that implementations of Rearden’s platform establish a new category of enterprise purchasing apps that will allow employees to buy travel, shipping, conferencing services, and pretty much anything not covered by standard purchase orders. That’s an enabling technology that companies have long desired.

Still, we’ve all seen beautiful technologies that didn’t succeed. Which is why we needed some big-time convincing before taking Rearden seriously. Lengthy demos, repeated poking and prodding at the product, and open-ended discussions with Rearden’s management team — especially CEO Patrick Grady — helped. Indeed, Executive Editor at Large Eric Knorr, who wrote the article, came away from every meeting he had with Grady more and more convinced that Rearden was on to something big — potentially industry-altering.

But Knorr admits that after a few hours, doubts would creep in. “Grady is a remarkably persuasive, charismatic guy,” he says, “With a hint of the ?teve Jobs reality distortion field’ around him.” The sheer force of his personality could make a believer out of almost any SOA atheist.

Soon Knorr began wondering whether he was drinking from the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid dispenser. He checked with tech luminaries who had worked on and with the platform. The verdict? From .Net architect Adam Bosworth to big-name partners who already have the platform in production, uniformly ecstatic. For Knorr, the clincher was Rearden’s deal with HP, which will resell EBS and help the service achieve critical mass.

In other words, regardless of how well it fares in the marketplace, Rearden is for real. And we’re delighted to take the wraps off it today, just as the company emerges from stealth mode.

On another note, the InfoWorld family is proud to announce its latest addition: Open Enterprise, an online-only weekly column by Associate Editor Neil McAllister. “This is not an open source advocacy column per se,” McAllister says. “There are plenty of sources for that. I’ll skip the rah-rah and focus on open source first and foremost as a powerful tool for driving competitive advantage.” Comments or questions? Send’? em to neil_mcallister@infoworld.com and help shape the column from its infancy.

Correction:

In this column, based on information supplied to us by Rearden Commerce, we originally referred to a distribution deal between that company and American Express. In fact, that deal never materialized. The error has been corrected.