SeeBeyond preps product suite upgrade

SeeBeyond Technology will be rolling out throughout the next four months a comprehensive upgrade of its enterprise applications integration software, rebranded as the SeeBeyond Integrated Composite Application Networks (ICAN) Suite 5.0.

The update, the suite’s most substantial overhaul since Version 4.0’s release in November 1999, includes enhancements in half a dozen core software components and the introduction of six new modules.

“The theme here is, ‘beyond integration,’ ” said Kate Mitchell, SeeBeyond’s senior vice president of marketing and business development.”Our customers for the most part are large, global organizations. They have an IT ecosystem that has evolved over 20 or 30 years, and often, it’s a mess.”

SeeBeyond’s goal for the revamp is to offer the industry’s most open, standards-compliant integration package, Mitchell said.

With a customer base of about 1,800 organizations, SeeBeyond, based in Monrovia, Calif., typically sells to large businesses with at least $3 billion in annual revenue. Its competitors include EAI (enterprise application integration) vendors Tibco Software and webMethods, along with larger middleware vendors such as IBM.

“Some of the big vendors — IBM, BEA [Systems], SAP and so on — would like people to standardize on their products. Our view is that it’s a completely heterogeneous world out there, and will remain that way,” Mitchell said.

The cornerstone of ICAN 5.0 is eGate Integrator 5.0, scheduled to ship by the end of March. The foundational integration software has been fully rebuilt around J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) and supports a host of J2EE technologies, including JCA (Java Connector Architecture) adapters and JMS (Java Messaging Service), according to senior product manager Chris Horne.

Updates throughout the ICAN suite will add new features for integration project change management and for programming-free Web services development, allowing users to graphically construct ready-to-deploy applications, Horne said.

Enabling Web services, a catchphrase that refers to technologies for connecting disparate applications supporting standards such as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and XML, is a key focus of ICAN 5.0, Horne said.

“Within the core platform, we’re natively supporting Web services,” Horne said. “At every point where it made sense to use Web services, we’ve done so, to maintain the openness of the suite. That gives us a lot of flexibility in how we plug and play with other environments.”

SeeBeyond will also be adding an array of new products to ICAN, which was in previous releases dubbed the SeeBeyond Business Integration Suite.

The new components include eVision Studio 5.0 and eView Studio 5.0 for application development; eBAM Studio 5.0 for business activity monitoring; ePortal Composer 5.0 for portal creation; and eTL Integrator 5.0 for ETL (extract, transform and load) handling. SeeBeyond also will introduce a lower-cost, scaled-down version of its eInsight business process management software, called eInsightOrchestrator 5.0.

All of the new products will be available worldwide by the end of June, SeeBeyond officials said. Pricing varies widely, but the average customer deployment involves licensing costs starting at approximately $300,000, Mitchell estimated.