SeeBeyond, WebMethods To Unveil New Integration Strategies

At an event in New York, SeeBeyond will unveil its Real-Time Information Network strategy to show how solution providers can deploy its middleware to improve integration across disparate systems, said Kate Mitchell, vice president of marketing and business development at the Monrovia, Calif.-based vendor.

SeeBeyond's strategy targets three development and deployment issues that using its integration infrastructure will improve, Mitchell said.

The first issue is visibility into the network from the supply chain all the way to the customer. The second is velocity, so solution providers can integrate applications and business processes in realtime. The third area is value, particularly for supply chain integration and CRM applications, Mitchell said.

Web services is an important part of the entire strategy, Mitchell said. However, she said, it must not be mistaken as a real substitute for other integration components--such as business processes--which must be in place for Web services to work.

Meanwhile, WebMethods plans to unveil Monday a three-pronged approach to helping solution providers build and deploy Web services that leverage existing investments in IT systems, said Kim Trudel, vice president of enterprise Web services at the Fairfax, Va.-based vendor.

WebMethods' strategy comes in response to customers that want to build Web services from applications they already have in their systems, Trudel said.

Customers want "to be able to take the investments they've made--packaged applications and business processes--and expose them as Web services," Trudel said.

WebMethods' Web services strategy will focus on three goals, she said. The first goal is to help solution providers take existing business processes and applications and expose them as services; the second is to manage those Web services once they have been deployed; and the third goal is to build services on a proven platform that uses existing technology to build new solutions, she said.

"We're saying, 'You don't have to take out what you've built, you don't have to do new development," she said. "'You can use what you already have.'"