Actional in Web services partnerships

ACTIONAL AT THE Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Fla., announced partnerships focusing on Web services with WebPutty and ClientSoft. WebPutty and Actional agreed to a plan intended reduce times for integrating enterprise applications with customized business systems. The vendors will work together to sell solutions based on WebPutty’s Application Platform, for changing applications within an existing infrastructure, and Actional’s SOAPSwitch, a wizard-based adaptation tool for exposing packaged application as Web services. Once the applications are exposed, the WebPutty product can enable developers to extend them with new functionality for development of custom solutions for company-specific business processes and initiatives, according to the two vendors. Actional and ClientSoft, meanwhile, announced an agreement through which ClientSoft will integrate ClientSoft Tanit Objects (CTOs) with Actional’s SOAPswitch and SOAPstation product lines to create a seamless Web services solution for mainframe enterprises. Tanit Objects delivers Web services from mainframe applications and complements Actional’s ability to “unlock” assets from enterprise applications such as SAP, PeopleSoft, and Siebel as reusable Web services, according to Actional. Tanit Objects is a suite of tools that wraps existing CICS and IMS programs and transactions as Web services and components, while also allowing CICS and IMS programs to use COM and Java components from other platforms, ClientSoft said.