Arming for the Web services joust

SELF-NAMED software from Elance isn’t a service in and of itself, but it promises to help enterprises make more efficient use of services they use everyday on various fronts. The solution, called Elance 3.0, launches this week at Demo 2002 in Phoenix.

Using emerging distributed, cross-platform capabilities, such as those found in J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) together with a variety of adapters should enable Elance to fit neatly into many different types of organizations.

Elance 3.0 contains four major modules: Management and Reporting, Project, Contractor, and Transaction Engine. The Management and Reporting component enables business leaders to view services expenditures throughout the enterprise. Moreover, key business rules, such as those that control corporate approvals, can be centrally managed. Business leaders using the console can gauge how effective the services provided by various providers are to the enterprise.

Elance’s Project module uses workflow automation to increase the efficiency of project planning, procurement, milestones, and vendor payments. Included collaboration tools increase communications with various service providers.

The Contractor component promises to help hiring managers and HR more effectively manage temporary workers. As does the Project module, the Contractor component includes the use of workflow automation to simplify hiring, expense reporting, corporate approvals, and payments.

The Transaction Engine module is designed to speed up the process of obtaining vendor service proposals. Customers can use it to publish requirements for services online. In turn, vendors can respond with detailed proposals and bids.

Aside from its application modules, Elance supplies several different adapters to allow enterprise customers to integrate the solution into their computing environment. Elance can be integrated with several different enterprise applications, such as procurement, financials, and HR software.

For example, the company supplies procurement adapters that allow customers to link the software with Ariba and Oracle enterprise application procurement modules. Moreover, Elance includes both webMethods and Tibco EAI (enterprise application integration) adapters so Elance can easily be hooked into other enterprise applications, such as SAP or Oracle financial modules.

Finally, Elance includes a LDAP server so that the solution can be linked with either internal corporate LDAP servers or HR modules in enterprise applications, such as PeopleSoft.

Under the hood, Elance rides on the midtier on BEA’s WebLogic application server. Elance uses various elements of the J2EE platform, such as RMI (Remote Method Invocation) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) to support services management across distributed enterprises. Elance also incorporates Oracle 11 and Version 5.0 of Accuate’s e.Reporting Server to round out its offering.