WRQ embraces Web services

THE EAI (ENTERPRISE application integration) segment is evolving rapidly in the wake of the emergence of Web services technologies. Every vendor in this category will be reinventing itself in the coming year as Web services technologies mature. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, WRQ President and COO Shaun Wolfe talks about how his company will be embracing Web services to drive the next generation of composite applications in the enterprise.

InfoWorld: How do you describe WRQ’s core mission?

InfoWorld: Integration issues will always be with us. Where do you see the most demand for EAI coming from these days?

Wolfe: Our sweet spot is around CRM, and I don’t mean necessarily just packaged CRM applications, but things around customer-related or customer relationship types of things. Self-service and call centers have been big for us, along with packaged CRM applications, particularly where real-time integration or real-time information is important.

InfoWorld: What differentiates your approach to EAI?

Wolfe: We can componentize a wide range of object types — legacy systems and databases and packaged applications — and make them interchangeable. That is a fundamental prerequisite for composite applications. We are able to have a repository by which we can bring in existing objects of really any sort or create object views of things that are more unstructured, like terminal applications or flat files, and make them truly interchangeable. The interesting thing about composite applications is that not only do you have to have this component structure to it, but they have to be loosely coupled components. They have to be really assembled at run time. There has to be a run-time environment in order to pull a composite application together. But you’re not creating any new business logic, or at least not much new business logic, in a composite application. You are assembling various other components and resolving the differences between them.

InfoWorld: How will Web services manifest themselves in this environment?

Wolfe: We are actually very strong proponents of Web services. Whether I’m going to use Web services sort of as a framework for how I do my work inside the firewall or [as] a way to publish information outside the firewall, the information as it exists today is not in a Web services format or a Web services capability. So I’ve got to be able to take what I have and make it available that way or I’ve got to rewrite everything I have. The notion of rewriting everything I have to become Web services is just not going to happen. But by using a composite application framework, people can componentize, or isolate, what they have today and make it available as a Web service. Or they can just remove a component and use the Web service of another component in the composite application. We believe this will allow the more rapid adoption of Web services because you don’t have to have everything in Web services before it becomes useful.

InfoWorld: As all this evolves, what role will business process integration ultimately play?

Wolfe: To be a true composite application or collaborative application, you need that capability. We have full business process workflow capabilities in our product today. What’s important about that is that it gives a higher order, or a more sophisticated view, of the workflow and it includes the holistic view of the system, which includes human interaction to that system. When we talk about a collaborative application or a composite application, the end result has to be able to deal with things like that.