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Smooth Integrators: Page 7 of 17

Integration Orchestrator 4.0, $25,000 per CPU, $12,500 per CPU for standby license, $7,500 per CPU for development and testing license (from one to four CPUs), $75,000 as tested. Sybase, (925) 236-5000, (800) 8-SYBASE. www.sybase.com


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.