SeeBeyond releases rebranded integration suite

SeeBeyond Technology Wednesday released a comprehensive upgrade to its suite of integration products, rebranded as the SeeBeyond Integrated Composite Application Network suite.

Version 5.0, which the company has called its most significant upgrade in four years, is certified as compliant with Version 1.3 of Sun’s Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform. The upgrade also adds new components for building “composite” applications assembled from existing programs.

SeeBeyond is demonstrating the upgrade – and talking up its new commitment to “open industry standards” – at its Horizons user conference this week in Las Vegas.

At the core of the suite is eGate Integrator, which has been rebuilt to comply with Sun’s J2EE 1.3 standard. Among other things, J2EE compliance means a customer can deploy applications configured using ICAN on application servers from other compliant vendors such as BEA Systems and IBM. It also provides developers with a more familiar and consistent runtime environment in which to work, said Alex Andrianopoulos, SeeBeyond vice president of product management.

Also upgraded is eInsight Business Process Manager, which includes graphical tools for mapping out a business process. Version 5.0 includes an implementation of the proposed  Business Process Execution Language standard. It also makes use of Web services technologies such as Web services description language and Simple Object Access Protocol to invoke other components in the suite.

Version 5.0 also includes components for building composite applications. These are assembled by linking together existing applications that comprise a business process, adding some new business logic and creating a user interface for the resulting program. eVision Studio is a new tool in the suite for creating GUIs for composite applications, while ePortal composer acts as a “GUI aggregator” for personalizing access.

Also new to the suite is eView Studio, which uses probability matching to provide a single view of an entity featured in multiple applications – for example, a bank could produce a single view of a customer’s checking account, saving account and investment activities. The suite also adds eBAM studio, a tool for business activity monitoring.

ICAN Version 5.0 is available immediately. In addition to the usual platforms, it supports HP’s NonStop high-availability servers, Andrianopoulos said. The components of the suite are available separately priced from $80,000 to $200,000, with pricing for a typical suite configuration ranging from $250,000 to $500,000, he said.