I will listen to the CC, I also have heard stc is good.
I could be completely wrong on this from a technical standpoint - however - my sense is that stc, vitria, active, crossworlds were EAI vendors that assisted you in moving transactions around inside your own firewall. Some of these products have workflow and XML mappers built in.
The other area is b2bi which is similar but has some sort of integrity outside the firewall which (for now) is somewhat proprietary and closed. Thats where webmethods is, pushing transactions outside the firewall. Thats why the exchanges ariba, cmrc OEM webmethods.
The BEA product is J2EE (enterprise java beans) which is the more standard way of doing what webmethods does, so its a formidable threat. But BEA marketing is so poor who knows what will happen with them. I sure wasn't impressed with that PR, but, their approach seems correct.
Vitria is reworking their product in some way to compete with webmethods in b2bi, and has won webmethods once I believe. Some other competitors are netfish and extricity (both private).
So overall I see the EAI companies as morphing into b2bi like vitria is, or merging with other players to compete for the really big deals. Thats what happened to active.
If you listen to anybody's conference call they all seem extremely upbeat, thats because the space is so strong. |
