Cape Clear Adds Data Integration To Web Services Stack

The software, the Cape Clear Data Interchange, is a part of Cape Clear's existing Business Integration Suite, a platform for creating, deploying and managing Web services to provide integration, said David Clarke, senior vice president of strategy and business development at Cape Clear.

The software suite also includes Studio, Server and Manager, which act as an enterprise service bus for linking enterprise applications to middleware and other systems via Web services and managing those services once deployed.

Clarke said that while many companies have begun to offer software leveraging XML-based Web services to integrate applications, he has been hard-pressed to find a vendor that has come up with a realtime way to integrate the myriad of documents involved in day-to-day business transactions.

"Most of what people do at their jobs is shuttle documents around," Clarke said. In fact, many companies are still processing documents in a paper trail that has reports, trade request forms, Microsoft Word files and spreadsheets sent to their destinations in a variety of ways, through e-mail, the Web, fax machines or even telephone calls.

Other vendors are interested in supporting XML-based integration of documents. Most notably, Adobe Systems has unveiled plans to support Web services-based document integration by XML-enabling PDF files.

In fact, in a keynote at the XML 2003 show earlier this week, Adobe Executive Vice President of Worldwide Products Shantanu Narayen demonstrated how generating schemas from PDF files will enable information from those documents to be integrated with enterprise applications.

Cape Clear Data Interchange also leverages XML schemas. The software provides a visual tool for defining and dynamically generating a document's structure as a schema. The software then sends the schema as an XML document to whatever back-end system the document needs to travel to, and transforms that XML into a file format the system recognizes so the information can be transferred seamlessly, Clarke said.

Clarke compared what Data Interchange does to what Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) does, except in realtime and for a much more affordable price. The software starts at $75,000 for initial development, deployment and five developer licenses, he said, and costs $10,000 per CPU to deploy on additional systems if a company wants to build out a larger solution. Data Interchange and the rest of Cape Clear's stack run on Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, Microsoft Windows and Linux.

Cape Clear currently does most of its business direct, but does have some key relationships with small to midsize solution providers in the United States, Europe and Australia, Clarke said. The company also has deals with distributors such as NESS in Israel, he said.

Considered one of the most successful among the niche Web services platform players, Cape Clear has about 200 customers worldwide, mostly large enterprises such as Vodafone, JP Morgan, British Telecom and Nortel Networks.

Clarke said Cape Clear intends to be to the Web services-based integration software space what BEA Systems is to the J2EE software market, a niche player that survives as a stand-alone company while others are gobbled up by competitors or forced to change their business model.

Indeed, The Mind Electric, one of the earliest startups in the enterprise service bus space, was acquired by EAI software vendor WebMethods in mid-October.

Adjoin and Talking Blocks, two niche players offering software for Web services management, a component of what Cape Clear's software stack does, also have been snatched up by larger vendors--Computer Associates International and Hewlett-Packard, respectively.

"If you look at some of the deals that have been made, they've been made out of weakness [of the acquired company], not strength," Clarke said. "We are more convinced we can maintain a strong company [on our own]."