Fujitsu Software's Interstage middleware suite is now
available in the US, Europe and Australia.
The suite comprises seven products which can be bought
separately or together.
The Interstage Business Process Manager is used to model and
then automate businesses processes by linking applications in a
workflow.
Formerly known as i-Flow, the product has been enhanced with
better capabilities for linking parts of a business process carried
out offline by people with parts that are carried out by machine,
said Robert Sepanloo, general manager for Interstage at Fujitsu
Software.
It works with application servers from BEA and IBM as well as
with Fujitsu's own.
Fujitsu also offers a version that requires no application
server, which is often embedded in products from
third-party suppliers such as iManage. Interstage Business Process
Manager starts at $49,000 (£29,264) per CPU.
Among the latest components in the suite is Interstage XBRL
Processor, a toolkit for developers creating financial applications
using XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language), a standard for
exchanging financial information in corporate business reports.
Interstage XBRL is "basically a Java library with some helpful
applications on the side". Pricing starts at $2,000 (£1,194) per
CPU.
"Anyone making a financial application, whether it's being
developed internally or using a packaged application, will need to
read and write to the XBRL format, and we'll help them get there a
lot faster," Sepanloo said.
The other new component is Interstage XML Search, for companies
wanting to store and search large volumes of XML data but do not
want the expense of supporting a full-function database.
The product does not search using indexes, which can be too
time-consuming to maintain, said Sepanloo. Instead, the software
"runs through and reads the whole file every time", he said.
Interstage XML Search uses a search algorithm developed by
Fujitsu that distributes as much as a terabyte or more of XML data
across a group of low-cost servers, such as blades running Linux,
where it can be searched in parallel. Pricing starts at $15,000
(£8,957) per CPU.
The other components in the suite are an application server, a
portal server, a content server and an integration server.
Fujitsu Software sells approximately $7m of Interstage products
a year. Through its marketing and partnership efforts it hopes to
lift that figure to $25m next year and $100m the year after
that, Sepanloo said.
James Niccolai writes for IDG News Service