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R E V I E W

Smooth Integrators

August 7, 2003
By Don MacVittie

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Vitria BusinessWare 4.1.1

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	In this article
	Introduction
	Sybase Integration Orchestrator 4.0
	Vitria BusinessWare 4.1.1
	Tibco BusinessWorks 2.0.4
	BEA Systems WebLogic Integration 7.0
	IBM WebSphere MQ Integrator 2.1
	How We Tested \| Web Links
	Report Card

BusinessWare is Vitria's EAI/BPM product, with support for Web services, JMS, IBM's MQ or Vitria's built-in transport.

BusinessWare installation was relatively simple, with the same JDBC issues that most other vendors had--when trying to configure JDBC to work with our test databases, each JDBC driver required different sets of parameters organized in a different manner. All accept user name, for example, but all want slightly different formats.

The relatively easy-to-use BPM designer that comes with BusinessWare is divided into "business layer" and "low-level," facilitating the use of business analysts to configure business-layer interactions and IS staff to design low-level interactions. We tested this premise, and Vitria makes a clear case for its design philosophy.

All our required functionality is present in BusinessWare, and more. We found the ability to easily switch directory and messaging providers a nice plus; you won't have to jump through too many hoops if you ever swap out parts of your infrastructure. Other vendors take differing approaches to directory services: BEA bundles them with its product; IBM requires that you create special accounts in ADS or LDAP, but does not supply a directory; and Sybase and Tibco use your directory or a bundled one.

The management console is overly complete, trying to give the administrator access to absolutely everything. While this might help track down problems, it did not facilitate our at-a-glance problem determination as other products did. We found that sticking to the main page minimized this problem; from there we could start, stop, undeploy and review alerts of running applications. During our tests--admittedly not as complex as a production enterprise integration is likely to be--we were frustrated by the amount of data presented in the initial management views.

BusinessWare earned its second-place berth thanks to its attractive pricing. While you won't be sorry if you choose it, management is not as straightforward as with other products.

BusinessWare 4.1.1, $245,000 as tested. Vitria Technology, (408) 212-2700. www.vitria.com