Siebel Taps EAI Vendors for New Integration Solution

Siebel, based here, is creating a prebuilt integration platform to make it easier for solution providers to connect Siebel apps to others in an enterprise, said Scott Opitz, senior vice president of marketing at Fairfax, Va.-based webMethods.

"What Siebel has focused on is to look for opportunities to preconfigure a number of business process they can generalize and have them prebuilt," Opitz said. "They can eliminate a lot of repetitive work that companies do out of the box."

Though many vendors have positioned products to support Web services, observers said integrating legacy applications with Web applications is still nettlesome. One solution provider said the industry was fooled into thinking integration would be easy with the advent of the Internet.

"The Web came out and everyone was like 'everything can talk to each other,' " said David Chao, vice president of sales and marketing at Greenwood Village, Colo.-based Navidec. "In reality, the Web created another level of complexity because you had ERP systems that didn't necessarily talk to your Web applications."

Reed Henry, senior vice president of services, support and alliances at SeeBeyond, Redwood Shores, Calif., said Siebel's Application Network will include a specification for how Siebel business objects will come together in process flows and how to represent application data elements that must be integrated with other applications in XML. "Siebel's out to lower the cost of integration . . . and push more dollars toward buying software and giving a client more rapid applications," Henry said.

When Application Network becomes available late this summer, both webMethods' and SeeBeyond's integration platforms will be compatible with it, said Opitz and Henry.

Siebel sought support from leading vendors in the integration space because creating integration products isn't Siebel's core competency.

"They don't have any technology that knows how to talk to systems," Opitz said. "With the Application Network, [Siebel chose to partner with companies like ours so the prebuilt stuff can be compatible with our integration technology."