Vitria's Tools Build The APP House

Vitria Collaborative Applications are prebuilt on top of Vitria's integration platform, BusinessWare, to solve a set of specific problems, particularly for vertical industries, said Dale Skeen, founder and CTO of the company. "They solve the problem of business-process management and business-process intelligence."

Four of the new applications target vertical markets, including health care, financial and manufacturing. A fifth product is a horizontal application for connecting commonly used packaged apps from vendors such as Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP and Siebel.

Skeen said solution providers currently solve these types of specific integration problems by building custom code on a per-case basis. "Now it's like people give them the tools and say, 'Here, go build a house,' " Skeen said. "What we provide out of the box is a prebuilt house. You still have the tools to customize it."

Jerry Iacouzzi, managing director for KPMG Consulting, McLean, Va., said Vitria's new applications are similar to collaboration efforts the two companies already have been implementing. "From a system integrator's perspective, it's not very different," he said. "Vitria is just adding more business content to their toolset,moving away from an [enterprise application integration toolset to more of an application focus."

Iacouzzi said this new functionality is a good fit for integration work solution providers already do, and it will help them get specific business processes in systems to work together faster.

"In the past, [integration software vendors would provide toolkits, and a systems integrator would provide business knowledge," Iacouzzi said. "Now we're trying to move that step back and create solutions ahead of the process . . . and bring more value add to customers."

Vitria's new applications include the Vitria Collaborative Application (VCA) for Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) 2.0, which helps health-care and insurance agencies become compliant with the act that standardized how patient information is transmitted and maintained among health-care providers, pharmacies and insurance agencies; VCA for Global Straight-Through Processing (GSTP) 2.0, which helps reduce the time and cost of trading securities in realtime among different systems; VCA for Collaborative Information Models Synchronization, for horizontal apps; VCA for Order Fulfillment, which targets the manufacturing industry and manages supply chain issues among disparate systems; and VCA for Outage Management for the utility industry.

Vitria had about 6 percent of the application integration software market in 2001, a market estimated at $2.3 billion, according to Giga Information Group.

Most of Vitria's sales are direct, about 50 percent to 60 percent of those sales are partner-influenced, Skeen said.