Applications /

Jamcracker beefs up application integration platform

By Jennifer Mears
Network World, 07/16/01

CUPERTINO, CALIF. - With enterprise customers putting more applications on the Web, vendors are scrambling to provide the infrastructure that will integrate the different packages and let them work together more efficiently. That's what Jamcracker has in mind with the latest version of its hosted application delivery platform.

Later this month, Jamcracker, an application service provider (ASP) aggregator, will announce partnerships with enterprise portal software vendor Epicentric and application integration server provider Vitria to enhance the capabilities of its IT Management Platform, an XML-based infrastructure that Jamcracker uses to deliver multiple applications. The enhancements will let users personalize the portal view of their applications, and let Jamcracker provide real-time integration between ASPs, and between ASPs and legacy systems.

"IT is under intense cost pressure to figure out how to build a next-generation platform to really utilize the Web inside their business," says Todd Johnson, vice president of worldwide marketing for Jamcracker. "Our business has really been about building this platform that brings together all of these tools (directory management, security, provisioning and the like) and delivering it as a managed service and open framework."

Jamcracker doesn't host applications. Instead, it acts as the conduit to deliver managed services from Web-based software providers and other ASPs. In addition to providing managed applications, Jamcracker also offers customers help-desk support, 24-7 monitoring and billing services, all through a single portal. However, Jamcracker hasn't been able to use its platform to truly integrate the applications it manages - until now, Johnson says.

Jamcracker used to offer some integration capabilities by running batch jobs between applications. For example, a user who wants data from a Jamcracker-delivered human resources application integrated with an in-house Oracle financial system could have Jamcracker run batch jobs nightly.

"But large enterprises want to use the flow of information from one application to another to replicate a business process," Johnson says. "And that's not a batch job; that's a real-time transaction-oriented process."

To provide that real-time integration, Jamcracker is incorporating Vitria's application integration technology, called BusinessWare, into its platform.

Jamcracker will still offer its standard platform and portal. However, users can get the advanced integration and personalization capabilities by paying about 20% to 30% more per application, Johnson says. The platform will be available for purchase July 23, but implementations will begin in the fall.

Tony LaRosa, vice president of enterprise IT at Kinetics in Santa Clara, a critical process infrastructure provider, looked at outsourcers such as IBM and Electronic Data System before signing a two-year contract with Jamcracker. He decided to go with Jamcracker because of the enhancements to its IT Management Platform, which will allow him to integrate his legacy applications with hosted services.

"I've been meeting with Jamcracker for over a year now and one of the requirements to move forward was this capability," he says. "We didn't want to lose our [IT infrastructure] investment here. We thought of Jamcracker as augmenting our IT, not replacing it."