Iona, Cape Clear Look To Break Out Of The PackIona, Cape Clear Look To Break Out Of The Pack

Iona Technologies plc and Cape Clear Software Inc., members of a pack of vendors trying to lure customers with Web-services tools, this week are unveiling product upgrades for companies looking to tie applications together using the emerging integration standards. Iona has started shipping an enterprise version of its Orbix E2A integration platform, and Cape Clear will ship version 3.5 of its platform, CapeConnect, by the end of the month.

Both companies are providing technologies not available in current Web-services standards, such as security, transaction integrity, and management. Standards today define the interface for an application to receive or send data formatted in XML, but "you need something that's going to integrate the applications so they can work together," Hurwitz Group analyst Tyler McDaniel says. Iona and Cape Clear provide the runtime environment for the XML processing between the applications.

The latest version of the Cape Clear platform provides support for VisualStudio.Net, Microsoft's application development environment for building and deploying Web services on Windows. Cape Clear says the capability makes it possible to leverage Web-services standards in connecting applications running on Windows and the Java 2 enterprise platforms. While Java and Windows make up a large part of the infrastructure for running Web applications, there's not much of a demand today to tie the two together with Web services. "I don't want to say that nobody is tying Microsoft and Java, but it's still pretty nascent," McDaniel says.

Iona is hoping to make its integration platform more attractive to the enterprise by providing pre-built adapters to business applications from Siebel Systems Inc., SAP, and others, as well as back-end infrastructure software such as IBM CICS, which manages transaction integrity. In addition, the Iona platform supports RosettaNet, XML standards for moving purchase orders, request for quotes, and other documents between businesses within the electronics industry.

Iona and Cape Clear are examples of smaller companies trying to stay ahead technologically of major vendors, such as IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems, to try to carve out a piece of the Web-services market while it's in its infancy. Lower prices are also a part of their strategy. Iona's platform starts at $150,000, while Cape Clear's CapeConnect is priced at $10,000 per CPU. Cape Clear is private, so revenue numbers are unavailable. Iona, based in Dublin, Ireland, reported last month pro forma earnings of $2.1 million, or 8 cents a share, on revenue of $180.7 million for 2001, an 18% increase from 2000. For 2002, the company has forecast revenue growth between 5% and 15%.