Candle Rolls Out Life-Cycle Line For Enterprise Customers

Candle Corp. is pushing into the e-business market with the release of its CandleNet family of e-business life-cycle solutions for enterprise clients.

The CandleNet products include enterprise application integration, middleware, enterprise and Web end-to-end solutions and distributed application performance monitoring tools. The company is targeting the indirect channel as the engine to drive new sales, said Andy Cahill, vice president of worldwide sales at Candle.

"What companies need to do is to move their mainframe capabilities into the e-business environment," Cahill said. "That means they need true end-to-end tools that extend throughout the enterprise and beyond the enterprise."

CandleNet Line: E-business offerings Enterprise application integration. Middleware, enterprise and Web end-to-end solutions. Distributed application performance monitoring tools. Wants to provide infrastructure for e-business exchanges.

In the future, El Segundo-based Candle is looking at setting up e-business exchanges, Cahill said. "Candle will be providing the infrastructure for e-business exchanges and for allowing companies to host ASPs and to provide for ASP integration," he said.

To this end, Candle is leveraging its eBusiness Assurance Network (eBA) solutions. The eBA offerings include software and services that enable enterprises to monitor and measure the customer experience of using an e-commerce site.

Bill DeWhitt, national accounts manager at Integrated Concepts Inc., said the Addison, Texas, Web integrator bundles Candle offerings with its own e-commerce solutions.

One thing setting apart Candle is its response to the customer, DeWhitt said. "They've been very responsive to our needs with regard to training,bringing people in to our facilities to get our people up to speed. One part of their business partner program I like is how they work with their business partners to help us promote their products."

Integrated Concepts began working with Candle's tools prior to moving into the Internet space but quickly leveraged its experience in Candle's technology to take advantage of the e-commerce opportunity, DeWhitt said.

"With the Internet, things have moved rather rapidly," DeWhitt said. "We were focused on the Candle eBA products, the service monitoring network products and incorporating those products into our product suite."

The company then began to evolve. "We used to be a systems integrator; now we're providing managed e-commerce solutions, which Candle is a major part of," DeWhitt said.

"One part of our product suite is called Ecom. It's a fixed price, fixed deliverable Internet offering, where we can get a customer up on the Web, full-blown e-commerce in 60 days at a fixed price," he said.

Candle's technology enables Integrated Concepts to build specific reports for its clients so that they can get a first-person look at how the customer views their site.

Candle's Cahill said, "It's really sort of leveraging our existing business to the e-business world."

The notion is "to combine the eBA capabilities,application response time monitoring,with the integration backplane capabilities, which form the enterprise application integration to provide a platform for Internet business that provides assurance, agility and flexibility required to do business on the Internet."CRN

For more on e-business solutions, go to: www.crn.com/enterprise