| Business Integration Engine (BIE) is the flagship product of a development company hoping to make waves in the software integration market. The company is Web Den Interactive (WDI). Described as "intriguing" by Patrick McGovern, the Director of SourceForge.net, BIE looks like an early contender in the relatively healthy market for integration software. How healthy? According to the Aberdeen Group, there are certain corporate wants and needs that are going to drive the increase of Enterprise Business Integration revenues up 8% to $3.9B this year.
File it under spending money to save money. In fact, Aberdeen states, in these tough times, EBI spending will grow faster than overall IT spending even though EBI revenues declined in 2002. Similarly, Gartner Group has labeled software integration as one of the fastest growing areas in IT, estimating the worldwide integration market to reach $10.5 billion in 2006. Michele Lambert, general manager, WDI, is not surprised: "I know a lot of companies that are trying to hold on to the systems they already have and looking for ways to integrate what they already have. They're looking for ways to push the data to whomever they need to push it." WDI is actually a division of Lake Forest, Ill.-based Brunswick Corporation, Lambert's parent company. She says Brunswick is a good example of that general industry need. Brunswick's developers first built the software in-house so that they could transfer data. Brunswick is a manufacturer of boats and marine engines, fitness equipment, and products for bowling and billiards. That adds up to do-or-die efficiencies in technology to support the chain of communications and documentation that are involved in a manufacturing company's business dealings with all its trading partners. "We have a lot of legacy systems sitting behind our firewalls," says Lambert. "We try to control our costs by not reinvesting but integrating what we already have; we had to be flexible and extensible." Finding a way to exchange data across different platforms without paying high software fees had them focused on evolving an integration system that would be platform-independent. According to Lambert, "We had a lot of different companies, too, through mergers and acquisitions and we needed a system that could integrate with just about anything." Brunswick started development of the BIE product two years ago; it started 'Brunswick New Technologies' last year and made 'Web Den Interactive' the technology development division of Brunswick New Technologies. In May, WDI announced it was taking BIE Open Source. In that move, the software is being distributed as Open Source under the GNU GPL, through WDI's web site and on SourceForge.net. |
| Lambert, meanwhile, remains highly confident that WDI's BIE debut will be able to compete with established proprietary integration software. "A lot of integration software has different focuses. Some focus on behind the firewall, where there is integration of two applications to one another, maybe CRM links to accounting systems, for example. Other packages focus on through the firewall, integrating to companies within your supply chain and distribution channel. You can say that is our niche. BIE can serve both." And their target audience is none other than the Fortune 1000, along with their dealers and suppliers.
Lambert is also confident that WDI's business model-giving away the software but relying on revenue from service and support-is right for WDI. They are following the tiered support-level model: "bronze" for unlimited online correspondence and unlimited access to online support; "silver" for access to the support center, online support, and login support from the WDI team; "gold" for the other services plus telephone access to developers. A number of companies doing business on Open Source and relying on service and support have gone out of business, we note. Lambert is not fazed. The publicist listening in on our call interjects that Red Hat and MySQL are certainly strong examples of Open Source companies with technologies that have achieved business growth. "My goal is to add BIE to that list," says Lambert. "We took a look at what we do very well and where we could bring in revenue from outside, and the answer was our development and project management strengths," she says. "Our core competency is planning and implementing integration projects. We provide support and professional services particularly with Internet technologies. Open Source gives us the ability to get our name out faster." Indeed, if employment sites are any indication of a company's skills set, the one at WDI indicates Internet developer strengths. "You could call us caffeine-driven webheads if you liked... we wouldn't care. We thrive on blistering discussions about elegant code and putting real solutions into users' hands," says a company description. Response to the Open Source release has been "wonderful" so far, says Lambert, and after only days of the BIE announcement, she says there were people posting to their open discussion group. Under the BIE hood is BMPI's Business Process Modeling Language. BMPI stands for Business Process Management Initiative. This is a non-profit doing something very close to Brunswick Corporation and other manufacturers' hearts: It defines its activity as a group that empowers companies to operate business processes "that span all multiple applications and business partners, behind the firewall and over the Internet." |
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