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F E A T U R E

Review: EAI Systems Bring IT Together

January 21, 2002
By Eric Sanchez, Dan Beery and Joshua Shehab


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Tibco Software ActiveEnterprise 3.0

Positioned as an end-to-end solution for the integration of disparate information stores, Tibco's ActiveEnterprise targets business users with at least a rudimentary level of technical knowledge. It's evident Tibco put a considerable effort toward this goal, as the product includes robust process-management and workflow capabilities, as well as abundant, automatically generated code to let business users design and implement processes with very little assistance from IT staff.

Tibco ActiveEnterprise's GUI (screen view)

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ActiveEnterprise is based on a highly modular architecture. Each of its components, such as the repository, integration server, messaging broker and monitoring tools, can run on different machines and plug directly into an information bus, which in turn connects all the components. This modular approach also makes ActiveEnterprise location independent. In addition, we appreciated ActiveEnterprise's ability to discover new applications dynamically, which makes adding new systems a rapid process. Communications across the bus are performed by a patented, serialized UDP (User Datagram Protocol). Unlike traditional UDP, serialized UDP ensures that the appropriate notification is sent in case of a communications error.

Given the wide variety of systems that companies must integrate, managing and monitoring the infrastructure can be confusing. Tibco ably addresses this problem with Hawk, a component that employs lightweight agents to fully monitor the system and process at all levels. This method of monitoring does not cause performance problems because Hawk does not continuously poll to see if systems are functional. Rather, it sends a one-time multicast to discover all the ActiveEnterprise components on the information bus. When a new application comes online, the new system sends an alert via the information bus.

ActiveEnterprise is an intuitive tool that lets business users model process flows. By acquiring and providing tight integration with InConcert, Tibco is one of the few EAI vendors to offer both process-automation and manual workflow capabilities, which are cohesively tied together. While Vitria also offers this capability, its approach is more rudimentary than Tibco's. Tibco's solution is horizontally focused, which makes ActiveEnterprise ideal for any organization with complex integration and process modeling issues.

ActiveEnterprise 3.0, enterprise and value-based pricing. Tibco Software, (650) 846-1000. www.tibco.com

Vitria Technology BusinessWare 3.1

For solving information-integration problems and automating business processes, BusinessWare is aimed at technical users. For process modeling, the product is geared more toward business users. Seasoned programmers can develop custom adapters using BusinessWare's connector software-development kit.

An interenterprise and B2B integration platform, BusinessWare excels in usability, offering a well-designed and intuitive user interface. The interface lets business users visually design many business processes without programming or configuring application connectors in advance. One key differentiator for Vitria is its Federated Architecture, which functions in the same manner as the Internet DNS (Domain Name Service).

Vitria's model-driven integration approach (screen view)

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BusinessWare takes a process-centric approach to integration. The product is one of the few to offer both process automation and workflow functionality. While these workflow features are surpassed on paper only by those offered by Tibco's product, BusinessWare lacks certain capabilities that are required in production environments, such as support for ad hoc processes, which let you modify processes that are already under way.

BusinessWare is a good fit for organizations that want to give business users control of process modeling and standard integrations, and that have Java programmers available for more complicated application development. The product's horizontally focused functionality makes it a good fit for any industry application. Vitria's support for Java standards is evidence that the company is looking forward to business demands as it develops its product.

BusinessWare 3.1, pricing based on number of components and servers. Vitria Technology, (408) 212-2700. www.vitria.com