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Vitria, Inventa try united front

Inventa will help customers install Vitria's enterprise integration applications, part of Vitria's strategy to fight off encroachment from competing vendors.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
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Kim Girard
2 min read
Vitria Technology is looking to its consulting friends to help guard its market share.

Vitria said today that Internet systems integrator Inventa will now help customers install Vitria's enterprise integration applications. Vitria makes software that acts as a bridge between different systems, including packaged applications, custom software, and database applications.

The partnership is intended to provide companies with the glue to connect online sales, service, or marketing systems with back office business applications and transaction systems. Forrester Research estimates that companies spend 30 percent of their IT budgets building and maintaining connections between applications.

Through the deal, Santa Clara, California-based Inventa plans to have Vitria's BusinessWare software up and running as quickly as within ten weeks using the company's LightSpeed deliver model.

Analysts say deals such as this one make smaller enterprise application integration companies stronger as they fight off encroachment from competing vendors, enabling them to hold their ground and grab market share while they can.

Mountain View, California-based Vitria's competitors include ''="" rel="">Oberon, ''="" rel="">CrossWorlds Software, and ''="" rel="">Frontec. But in this space, companies are facing an increasing threat from enterprise resource planning application vendors such as ''="" rel="">SAP, =''http: www.oracle.com="" ''="">Oracle, and ''="" rel="">PeopleSoft.

ERP vendors are doing much more these days to make sure other applications run with their systems.

Vitria's BusinessWare 2.0, released in May, combines four components within a single server for integrating disparate computer systems into new applications. The package includes Process Automator, a development tool for integrating applications using business models instead of programming code; Realtime Analyzer, a tool for querying and analyzing data stored in multiple linked applications; Communicator, which acts as a backbone for transferring data among linked applications; and Connectors, which link databases, applications, and other systems to the BusinessWare Server.

BusinessWare 2.0 is priced from $60,000.