BroadVision has expanded its OEM agreement with webMethods to
provide integration capabilities for its entire suite of
self-service applications.
BroadVision Integration Services, based on webMethods technology,
is designed to accelerate integration between BroadVision's
self-service applications and backend systems.
WebMethods software provides an integration layer within
BroadVision's products, allowing BroadVision applications to
connect directly to customer backend systems to access information
and business processes contained in those systems, said Simon King,
BroadVision's vice-president of advanced strategy.
BroadVision Integration Services is available with a variety of
pre-built adapters for popular backend systems, including Baan, IBM
MQ Series, J.D. Edwards, Microsoft Message Queuing Oracle,
PeopleSoft, SAP, and Siebel. These adapters are designed to handle
low-level application interfacing and provide users with a
graphical environment for configuring business logic and data
transformations.
The new service also includes mini-portals, or "portlets", to allow
data from common systems such as Oracle HR, SAP, and Siebel to be
displayed in the BroadVision InfoExchange Portal.
"What we're defining is a services layer that fronts one or more
legacy systems, and those services will be callable from a range of
portlets," King said. "An end-user can just configure a portlet
that is connected to SAP inventory, and they can actually track
inventory for a particular product from their home page."
As part of the agreement, webMethods has designed several different
bundling capabilities depending on enterprise needs, said Debbie
Rosen, senior vice-president of industries and alliances at
webMethods. For example, customers interested in integration for an
internal employee benefits portal would use a different bundle to
an enterprise interested in linking to external trading partners,
she said.
"We really understood how to craft and support the more lightweight
configuration so [BroadVision is] not required to have integration
sales specialists selling all this," said Rosen. "They really
wanted to enhance their customers' capabilities out of the box as a
feature and not as a full product."