| QUESTION & ANSWER |
Bauhaus on Sun's march into SOA |
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By Rich Seeley, News Writer
25 May 2006 | SearchWebServices.com |
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What's going on with the integration of the SeeBeyond middleware with the Sun Java platform since Sun's acquisition SeeBeyond was completed in August 2005? We get some answers in part one of a Q&A interview conducted at JavaOne with Mark Bauhaus, senior vice president, Business Integration, App Platform and Identity Management Software at Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Read part two. How is the acquisition of SeeBeyond working out strategically?
Mark Bauhaus: You know when we bought SeeBeyond, we evaluated a couple dozen companies, all the names that you would think of. And a lot of those have re-boiled old technology or they have acquired companies that were completely incompatible. Hub-and-spoke here, distributed there, C here, Java there, Web services on the outside, proprietary on the insides. It's not very attractive.
Our strategy is to leapfrog the competition and build a standard offering that really builds a complete lifecycle. You can start with a visual picture business process, literally saying, I'm the customer, look at the inventory, check the payment system, do the what-ifs and approvals, build a flow chart of it, use that as the basis to generate code, connect up the DB2, Oracle, BEA, .NET components underneath, do the data transformations, compose the services, and do all that in a visual environment that generates code. I don't have the discontinuous development cycle that you have with an IBM or others where you build a nice business process picture, you print the paper and then you start over with the data model and then you start over again with the business logic and then you start over again to try and wire together an application. It's old news, that's old style.
We've chosen a company in SeeBeyond that is technically compatible and consistent with Sun's architecture. They, like us, used entirely standards-based Java EE, JMS, Web services, Net Beans, right down the list, so it's made it easier than we thought to bring our technologies together.
Sun's the only company that's got that full lifecycle. That's really SeeBeyond plus Sun together that makes that possible. And an important side product of that [is] to be able, any where along that process, to take the code that was generated, the WSDL, the XML, the Java, take it out to a standard IDE of your choice and run the one you want, edit that code, customize it to make it better, put it back in the system, round-tripping and still have all the wiring, the visual environment that keeps all the standards artifacts, all the BPEL, the Java EE components, the screens, the adaptors, the WSDL, all of that in a common repository that you can actually build, manage and not have a bunch of disparate parts all over the place. Our competition can't do that. Because they've built out of a disparate architecture of companies acquired that doesn't work. So, this is really, truly unique.
How are the SeeBeyond's customers responding to this integration with Sun?
Bauhaus: Well, we're getting a great update from old customers re-upping. Many of them had never bought from Sun and were not Sun customers traditionally, customers who are brand new, people who are signing up, who've done their evaluation after the acquisition.
Where are you in the integration of products from SeeBeyond
Bauhaus: We've accelerated by about a year the technology integration and the product roadmap that we had originally planned. We've shipped our Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite at the end of March, as we'd promised. We also announced a series of sub-suites that weren't originally planned until later. That includes a B2B suite, an ESB suite, an application platform suite, a Web infrastructure suite. All those are parts inside of the Java Composite Application Platform Suite. So, the bottom line is a lot of functionality.
If you look at the industry right now, there are a lot of people who would like to have an open source SOA platform. With this [the integration of SeeBeyond's products] we think we have the most comprehensive open source SOA platform anywhere. If you look at the open source stuff, the app server, the portal environment, the BPEL engine, the enterprise service bus, the Web services and Web services interoperability with Microsoft, the tool environment with Beans and so on, we have the most comprehensive open source SOA platform anywhere. Now the expression of that as product that you bet your business on is the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite.
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