PeopleSoft has used its Connect 2002 user conference in New
Orleans, USA, to take the wraps off a product suite designed to
reduce the complexity and expense of integrating applications from
multiple vendors.
AppConnect uses Web services to pre-integrate PeopleSoft's existing
portal, application integration, and warehouse products. The
AppConnect suite includes the company's Integration Broker and
Enterprise Warehouse products. AppConnect will now be sold as an
integration product suite, along the lines of a CRM or financial
package, according to Peter Gassner, vice-president and general
manager of PeopleSoft's Application Infrastructure group.
AppConnect seeks to solve the expensive and complex problem of
tying together applications from multiple vendors, he said.
"If you [look] at how application integration is done today, it is
very expensive because companies buy portal, EAI, and warehouse
products and then the CIO has to integrate those integration
products together," Gassner said.
PeopleSoft is well positioned to tackle the integration problem,
according to Gassner, because it can dig into three distinct
application layers.
"We are the first company to come at application integration on the
portal level, [and] on the traditional EAI and warehouse levels.
You need to connect applications at these three levels, for the
people, the process, and the data," he said.
AppConnect products support J2EE and .net and communicate with each
other using Web services standards. The Enterprise Portal and
Enterprise Warehouse products include basic Web services support,
while the Integration Broker product offers more sophisticated Web
services capabilities such as transformation and routing.
AppConnect runs on top of either BEA WebLogic or IBM WebSphere
application servers.
In addition to creating links between the suite products, Web
services technology also helps pave the way for integration with
competing products from the likes of SAP and Oracle.
"That is the neutral way to communicate. There are a lot of
standards and products are starting to use them. Going forward the
need for these special connectors is going down because
applications like PeopleSoft and SAP both talk Web services,"
Gassner said.