Cordys preps middleware software

A Web-services platform that promises to deliver improved corporate systems interoperability has been quietly introduced to a select set of customers by Cordys Systems BV, a company of The Vanenburg Group in Putten, the Netherlands.

The company has about eight clients worldwide for the platform, dubbed the Cordys Business Collaboration Platform (BCP). It will be formally launched in the first quarter of next year, according to Dorairaja Bharath, president of Vanenburg Asia.

Headed by Jan Baan, Vanenburg Group, earlier called Baan Investments, was a major shareholder in ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendor Baan Co. NV in the Netherlands, until it sold its stake to Invensys PLC in London in 2000, in the wake of an accounting scandal.

Earlier this month, Baan was again sold, this time to SSA Global Technologies Inc. The Vanenburg Group, however, has moved on and has investments in several companies, including Cordys, through Vanenburg Capital Management.

“Our story is beyond ERP, and what we mean is that ERP systems have tended to be four-walled systems, that optimize the processes within these four walls, ” said Bharath. “There is a lot of heterogeneity coming into the enterprise such as supply chain management (SCM) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications and in-house developed productivity applications. The heterogeneity is not only in the applications but in the technology as well, as some applications will be on Unix and others stay on .Net.”

The integration between these applications is only partial, and sharing of data among these diverse applications and technologies often requires a large back office effort where the data is fed manually from one system to another, according to Bharath. “The opportunity for us is to provide a platform that facilitates these systems to talk or collaborate with one another at the level of people, applications, processes, and the data,” he said.

Cordys Web Collaboration Platform (WCP) version 1.4, a component of the Cordys BCP solution, connects applications such as ERP, SCM, and CRM and Web services using open standards such as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), XML (Extensible Markup Language), WSDL (Web Services Description Language), and LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol).

Applications and services plug into the Cordys platform, and post their data or receive data from it. The platform takes care of infrastructure requirements such as coordinating the interactions between applications and services. It exposes enterprise applications, via the Internet, to external and internal business partners using WSDL, HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), and SOAP, and can link to external Web services complying with the same standards, according to Cordys.

The second set of tasks that WCP handles involves the routing and management of data based on content and access control. It connects into packaged applications and databases using the Cordys Connector Architecture, or through prebuilt application connectors shipped with the platform, and also provides a messaging backbone.

Through its Collaboration Process Component, Cordys BCP provides an environment for graphically configuring business processes and rules, and for real-time monitoring.

“Customers do not have to junk their existing applications, but instead create an application connector, which is essentially a Web services wrapper, around them, that enables them to talk to each other using web services,” added Bharath. “Once these applications are talking to each other, they look like one monolithic application, and you can put a process flow across, and do business process integration and implement inter-application workflow and inter-application process integration.”

In addition, Cordys provides a Business Intelligence Portal through which users can access performance indicators, analyze business intelligence, and use collaborative communication tools. “So these are in effect three products that talk to each other in a Web services mode ” Bharath said.

Cordys has so far introduced the BCP to a few customers so as to have a representative installed base of customers before the formal launch next year, according to Bharath. Vanenburg plans to use the platform as the basis for developing “lean manufacturing” applications — software designed to help companies build products in the most cost-efficient manner possible.