Cordys was founded almost three years ago by Jan Baan
and others from his team at ERP software company Baan Software (now
part of SSA Global Technologies). Two months ago, Cordys announced
global availability of its web services platform.
Justin Anderson, the newly installed president of
Cordys' Americas group, talks about the company and its web
services technology.
With Jan Baan as chief executive of the company, you
have an IT veteran with a lot of background in ERP. What will that
expertise in the enterprise applications market bring to the
table?
The 22-year heritage there plays a key role in coming out with
this next-generation tool. When Baan veterans were developing ERP
systems, they were dealing with security and scalability issues,
and how do you make these businesses unique. We never were able to
fulfill the mass customisation vision with ERP. Companies did big
business process re-engineering and got a document that said how
their business should look. They got automation tying departments
together but found they looked just like their competitors. Now,
chief executives are struggling to make their businesses
unique.
As ERP was trying to grow, they would buy a CRM company or an
advanced planning solution suite and try to bolt all those
together, and that compounded the problems. It is the same thing
with an application platform suite: If you try to bolt all those
pieces together, you are going to have the same issues, and it is
going to create a lot of complexity for you.
Will your target market be companies trying to build
composite applications?
Yes. You would use our unified stack to create composite
applications in a services-oriented architecture, so that
means exposing all the disparate legacy systems instead of ripping
and replacing all those ... to enable the vision of the CEO or CIO.
Our platform makes the ERP systems' application infrastructure so
there are reusable components, and we can start with business
processes to fulfill making companies unique.
How does your technology differ from integration
software?
We are open-standards-based, and we have an XML application
server and XML containers across that whole stack that we have
built from the bottom up. If you go with us, you're not buying a
best of breed, you're not buying a BPM tool that someone is trying
to integrate with an enterprise service bus. It gives you quicker
time to deployment and more productivity in the tools set, which
leads to lower cost of ownership.
How does your technology support enterprise efforts to
go beyond using web services for internal integration to build
composite applications?
We have a component gallery - prebuilt building blocks - to help
you start that. For example, we have something called B2B Express,
which helps companies deal with their trading partners, customers
and suppliers so they can build those composite applications.
We can take excess inventory ... and expose that through a web
service to an online auction and then track that sale through a
sales force automation tool. You can see the goods move out of
inventory ... and those sales are reported and tracked in the CRM
system. It is all in one user interface.
A lot of companies are still struggling within the four walls to
define their ... business process needs ... and they really can't
be extensible until they lock those down.
Heather Havenstein writes for IDG News
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