Iona is moving to keep mobile users involved in the workflow of everyday business with Web services-based middleware designed to let them access applications with or without a network connection.
WALTHAM, MASS. – Iona is moving to keep mobile users involved in the workflow of everyday business with Web services-based middleware designed to let them access applications with or without a network connection.
The company next week will ship its Mobile Orchestrator, the first in a series of tools for organizing Web services applications and business processes, and tying them together into a coherent workflow. The Mobile Orchestrator is a messagedriven, Web services-based process integration broker designed for use with mobile applications where users don’t always have a network connection.
The software would let companies give mobile workers offline access to applications, workflows and corporate resources. The user then would synchronize his work with the application on the server once he reconnects to the network.
The software also can use Web services to tie together different applications involved in a workflow process, such as completing a transaction from order entry to fulfillment.
“Building mobile applications today is hard because the technology is primitive and the development work very manual,” says Ted Schadler, principal analyst for Forrester Research. “Today, you can basically do e-mail and some data downloads, but building applications that work online and offline is hard.”
Schadler says Iona understands the complexities of message-driven integration from its experience with Common Object Request Broker Architecture. But he says the company will be challenged in fostering adoption of Mobile Orchestrator because it will have to sell the product through independent software developers for all but the largest companies.
For Iona, Mobile Orchestrator is the first in a line of tools for integrating business processes that Iona plans to develop for its Rapid Integration product line.
The company competes with similar products from Kenamea and KnowNow.
The software includes a Java-based server and client software integrated with applications that run on mobile devices.
Companies interested in the client/server package will need to use Iona’s Orchestrator Studio to build mobile process orchestration support into existing or new applications.
Iona also is teaming with Intel to support its Centrino wireless chip, which will work with the Orchestrator server.
Iona is using a store/forward messaging model to facilitate the synchronization of data. Orchestrator Web services interface uses Simple Object Access Protocol messages and FTP for transporting those messages.
“FTP is ubiquitous, very reliable and great for transferring files,” says Pat O’Brien, vice president of corporate strategy for Iona. O’Brien says that while Orchestrator is based on Web services standards, Iona still uses a proprietary process modeling language. But the company is keeping an eye on the emerging Business Process Execution Language for Web Services, a modeling language IBM and Microsoft are developing.
Orchestrator server software will cost $18,000 per processor. The client software will be priced starting at $130 per person for 250 people. The development and design tool will cost $1,500 per license.
