Iona squeezes new life out of CORBA, middleware

By John Hogan, SearchWebServices.com News Editor 17 Oct 2003 | SearchWebServices.com

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Middleware was once seen as the most logical way to get disconnected applications to speak to each other. Somewhere along the line, however, it wore out its welcome and turned into a bloated and expensive-to-maintain method of integration.

In fact, one analyst has predicted that the middleware market will fade away in as soon as three years.

Now, Iona Technologies Inc. has developed a new platform of service-oriented integration tools that serve as a sort of recycling program for middleware and other applications.

The Dublin-based company, whose U.S. headquarters are in Waltham, Mass., on Friday announced the details of its Artix platform of Web services products.

The four stand-alone products in the platform are based on Iona's adaptive run-time technology, which is a middleware abstraction with components for Web services. This run-time environment was also used to create Iona integration products based on Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) standards.

However, the new Artix platform isn't a rehash of old technology, said Eric Newcomer, Iona's chief technology officer.

"It's not a retrofit," he said. "[Artix is] a brand new product we developed from our adaptive run-time technology."

Replacing 'hub and spoke' EAI

Newcomer said that with his company's service-oriented approach, integration software is placed at the end points of a network, rather than the middle, as is the case in the "hub and spoke" method of traditional enterprise application integration (EAI) software. The end-point approach provides companies with greater flexibility because that is where a Web service is first accessed, he said.

Newcomer also said that the Artix products allow companies to reuse application code to create Web services and consolidate overlapping functions in their middleware applications.

Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass., said that of the four products in the Artix platform, he sees the most promise in Artix Encompass, which he called "the least EAI-like" because of its end-point integration.

Schmelzer has predicted the demise of the middleware market because it is becoming "less and less viable" due to heavy infrastructure requirements such as messaging and because of burdensome maintenance costs .

A Web service product like Encompass, he said, eliminates the need for such infrastructure and helps companies reuse and consolidate applications they've already paid for. Encompass offers support for CORBA- and C++-based Web services.

Other Artix tools

There are three other products in the platform.

Artix Relay is Iona's middleware interoperability product. Newcomer said Relay creates links between middleware platforms, without developers having to rewrite or rearchitect such systems. Relay can bridge middleware platforms such as CORBA/IIOP, WebSphere MQ (formerly MQSeries), BEA Tuxedo and Tibco Rendezvous.

Artix Mainframe exposes mainframe Customer Information Control System (CICS) and Integration, Management and Scalability (IMS) transactions as Web services without requiring mainframe application changes.

Artix Migrate is a tool that helps companies migrate to a single middleware platform to save maintenance and support costs.

Schmelzer said a short-term goal of Iona seems to be to leverage the customer base for Orbix, the company's implementation of the CORBA 2.1 integration standard. "They are taking a second bite out of the apple" with CORBA, he said.

He said the long-term play for Iona, and the one in which the company has the most potential, is using service-oriented integration to help companies reuse and consolidate existing applications in ways they hadn't originally intended, and to get rid of some middleware that has become too expensive to maintain.

Iona's Artix customers

Iona said that it already has customers using the Artix products, including BellSouth, Sprint and Zurich Insurance. Mark Rogers, vice president of Iona's Artix business unit, said he couldn't talk about the specifics of the implementations, but did say that customers are using the products to consolidate their middleware infrastructures.

Rogers said the typical price range for the individual Artix products is between $150,000 and $300,000 for an enterprise deployment.

The Relay and Encompass products are shipping now. The Mainframe and Migrate products will ship later this quarter.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Article: The three steps to Web service integration

Best Web Links: Messaging technologies

Best Web Links: CORBA

Commentary: Web services and EAI: Partners or rivals?

Tags: Web Services Architect,  Web Services Basics,  SOAP,  UDDI,  WSDL,  XML,  Related Protocols and APIs ,  Java,  Platforms and Servers,  Free Tutorials/Courseware,  Community,  Messaging Technologies,  CORBA,  VIEW ALL TAGS

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