Webify looks to manage apps services

Webify configures services platform for insurance industry

Webify this week plans to roll out insurance industry-specific application components and a platform for managing service-oriented business applications.

Webify Fabric 4.0's components give insurance companies a set of prebuilt, service-oriented applications they can deploy separately or use as components of multipart, composite applications that Gartner calls service-oriented business applications (SOBA). Webify Fabric helps users assemble, deliver and manage SOBAs.

Experts say Webify, Seec Systems and Tenfold are a new breed of application providers delivering components instead of monolithic applications.

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Webify this week plans to roll out insurance industry-specific application components and a platform for managing service-oriented business applications.

Webify Fabric 4.0's components give insurance companies a set of prebuilt, service-oriented applications they can deploy separately or use as components of multipart, composite applications that Gartner calls service-oriented business applications (SOBA). Webify Fabric helps users assemble, deliver and manage SOBAs.

Experts say Webify, Seec Systems and Tenfold are a new breed of application providers delivering components instead of monolithic applications.

"Ten years ago these guys would be enterprise application vendors," says Ron Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink. "Now they are service-oriented, composite-application vendors. It is noteworthy. It shows where the industry is headed."

Schmelzer says other vendors, including Oracle and SAP, are breaking their application logic into components instead of assembling them into one massive application.

"The days of coming up with new applications and selling multimillion-dollar enterprise applications in monolithic blocks - I think those days are over," Schmelzer says.

So does Webify. The company is focusing its development efforts on creating application components tailored to specific industries. Insurance is the first target industry in what will be a model of pairing Webify Fabric to assemble and manage application components with a set of starter applications.

One insurance application in Webify Fabric 4.0 is the New Business module, which supports risk assessment, underwriting, quote processing and integration with policy-management systems. The Policy Lifecycle module supports rules-driven processing; the Claims Lifecycle module provides claims support, fraud protection and routing; and the Agency and Partner Services module supports integration of services with independent agents and other insurance firms. The modules include prebuilt transformation engines to convert data formats from back-end systems to XML formats.

Webify Fabric supports the insurance industry-specific ACORD XML format, and IBM's Insurance Application Architecture. The software's components include life-cycle management tools that let users assemble services into business applications, deploy those applications and manage them based on performance and a set of defined metrics.

In Version 4.0, Webify has added a multiauthor, multilocation governance service that lets users work in a distributed environment. Webify Fabric runs on any Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition application platform, including those from BEA Systems, JBoss, IBM and Oracle.

Webify Fabric 4.0 is shipping and starts at $250,000 for an entry-level configuration.

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