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Smooth Integrators: Page 8 of 17

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


BusinessWorks is Tibco's BPM solution laid atop its ActiveEnterprise core messaging suite. The BusinessWorks designer is intuitive, not cluttered like some of its competitors.

Installation was relatively simple, but like most rivals, JDBC was a pain to get configured correctly: Yet again, we were forced to finagle parameters and parameter order until we were able to connect with each database. Once database connections were complete, we were able to move forward with the BPM designer.

The design tool in BusinessWorks was straightforward, with integration parts divvied up much more cleanly than competitors. Shared resources were in a single folder, where we could easily go back and reuse them during our testing. All the functionality we required in an EAI package, including real-time updates and Web services support, was present.

While it took us as many steps to create a simple database-field-to-database-field update as it would have with a rival, BusinessWorks made the process less painful by using Tibco's Rendezvous transport agent and ActiveDatabase connections. Support for creation of Web services out of EAI modules is an excellent benefit that other vendors will pick up on quickly. A more intuitive version of this feature contributed to Integration Orchestrator winning this review, and BEA has informed us that this functionality will be in its next release of WebLogic Integration.