BANGALORE, INDIA (02/14/2000) - With the help of Indian software companies, Sun Microsystems Inc. will be offering adapters that link a variety of applications to its Forte Fusion Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) suite.
Sun has signed up Coldstone Softech Ltd. of Hyderabad to design the adapter for applications from Siebel Systems Inc., while Bangalore-based PSI Data Systems is developing the adapter for applications for SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Financial Telecommunications), the banking cooperative for electronic funds transfer.
"In EAI there is always a requirement for adapters," said John Spiers, vice president of international marketing in Sun's Internet Applications and Performance Tools division in California.
"In our case adapters convert a native application to XML," Spiers said. Sun's strategy on the adapters is three-pronged, and includes building adapters in-house, working with third parties for development of adapters, and offering tools for custom development of adapters.
As part of this strategy, Sun is planning tie-ups with Indian software development outfits for adapters. Forte Software Inc. was acquired by Sun in October last year, and Forte is now a brand within Sun for the EAI product suite, Java development tools, and compilers and 4GL (fourth-generation language) software.
According to Spiers, the acquisition of Forte was part of Sun's strategy to fill out its product line. The way Sun has deployed solutions with clients is to use partners, but increasingly people don't have time to integrate the infrastructure before they start building applications, Spiers said. "Our view is that the market will move more towards being infrastructure vendors, vendors of the stack."
The Forte for Java development products are offered in three editions -- an entry-level, single user Community Edition; an Enterprise Edition for distributed applications running across multiple servers; and an Internet edition scheduled for release later this year. The Community Edition, formerly NetBeans Developer 3.0, came from Sun's acquisition of NetBeans Ceska Republika A.S. of the Czech Republic. The Enterprise Edition is the former SynerJ from Forte. The Internet edition is an enhanced version of the NetBeans product, targeted at small teams of developers targeting a single application server for deployment.
Although there isn't a detailed road map yet, Spiers said, there is a move to converge the Forte for Java development products into common code for the NetBeans and Forte products, to achieve a common experience and upgradability for developers. The segmentation between the three editions of Forte for Java may also be collapsed, and instead there may be about 50 different functional components from which users can choose.
Sun Microsystems Inc., in Mountain View, California, can be reached at +1-650-960-1300, or at http://www.sun.com/.