Event
Summary
Active Software, Inc. (Nasdaq: ASWX), a provider of enterprise application
integration software products, today announced the ActiveWorks Application
Transaction Coordinator (ATC) to ensure the transactional integrity of
end-to end business processes.
A
new component of the ActiveWorks Integration System, the ATC is said to
provide guaranteed application-to-application transactional reliability
and monitoring regardless of what different transaction models are used
by each application. According to the company, "using Active Software's
ATC, organizations can ensure that all business processes complete successfully,
enabling customers to trust their most critical data to eBusiness integration."
Active Software's ATC is already in use at multiple customer sites within
the telecommunications, financial services, and high technology industries
where transaction integrity is a critical issue.
"As a leading provider of Internet-based procurement systems, we have
to be able to process hundreds of thousands of transactions very quickly
while simultaneously ensuring that all transactions complete successfully
across multiple application systems," said Rusty Frantz, vice president,
engineering, Outpurchase.com. "Active Software's ATC guarantees that no
critical data is lost, enabling us to reduce our risk and increase the
speed of our online procurement solutions."
Active states "the ActiveWorks Integration System from Active Software
automates end-to-end business processes both within the enterprise and
with customers and business-to-business (B2B) trading partners across
the Internet. With the ATC, organizations will be able to guarantee that
each integration process completes successfully, providing end-to-end
reliability between packaged applications both inside and outside the
firewall. The ATC complements the guaranteed messaging provided by the
ActiveWorks Information Broker by bridging independent applications' transaction
systems that operate in isolation of transactions that extend beyond an
individual application."
"Transactions
are fundamental to eBusiness; however, in today's network economy, transactions
typically involve a variety of different systems all working independently
of each other," said Zack Urlocker, vice president, marketing, Active
Software. "Until now, organizations that needed to ensure overall business
process integrity were required to develop tremendous amounts of custom
code to guarantee that these different systems were working together.
Using Active Software's ATC, customers can now ensure complete end-to-end
transactional integrity. This enables them to reap the benefits of a complete
eBusiness infrastructure that can handle the complex, mission-critical
transactions that often span multiple systems with complete confidence."
Market
Impact
Active is making a huge claim as to the strength of this software. The
components in the product include transactional integrity across applications,
error notification, and log notification of business events. However,
their claim of guaranteed transactional integrity across the business
will be difficult to deliver. The fact that applications of this type
typically span local area networks, wide area networks, routers and firewalls,
makes "guaranteed transactional integrity" a serious challenge.
User
Recommendations
A high level of custom programming is obviously going to be required to
design the logical units of work that make up the individual transactions
between systems. TEC strongly encourages customers to factor the cost
of consulting into the total purchase price before signing the contract.
Active states "product pricing starts at $15,000 and will vary with the
size and complexity of customer projects." This statement leaves a lot
of room for additional fees. In addition, reference sites should be sought
to verify the quality of the software, and of the consulting provided.
The vendor should also be questioned as to whether they have experience
in the particular vertical market the customer is interested in pursuing,
since Active states that they currently only have experience in the telecommunications,
financial services, and high technology verticals.