OBJECTSPACE LATER THIS month will deliver a suite of integration software that will play a key role in General Motors OnStar services portal and potentially ease the pain in developing other business to business applications.

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ObjectSpace, an Austin, Texas-based developer of business-to-business software, will be used as the integration platform for third parties to offer services, such as airline reservations and weather, through GM's OnStar in-vehicle customer information system. See related story, E-cars take to the streets.

GM is building a "software backplane" that will allow outside companies to plug their application services into the OnStar portal with minimal work and with flexible billing to support different types of business models, explained Bruce Flory, the vice president of ObjectSpace. The initial OnStar information service has a call center to deal with subscriber requests but the next phase will be automated and scale to many more services.

"GM realized that the infrastructure they to put in place had to take human attendants out because it wouldn't scale, and it had to be open enough to partner with any service provider for OnStar in a crisp, flexible way," Flory said.

ObjectSpace's OpenBusiness B2B Integration Platform, which will ship at the end of the month, provides the object translation layer across CORBA, DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model), Java, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), and RMI (Remote Method Invocation) protocols for the system. Wrappering technology allows service providers to plug into the OnStar service provider network without rewriting applications. On top of invoking objects and exchanging data, the integration platform also ensures security across different companies' firewalls, Flory explained.

Later in the year, ObjectSpace will release the OpenBusiness Process Server, which includes a business process modeler and a mechanism for managing data and workflow between different company systems.

ObjectSpace Inc., in Austin, Texas, is at http://www.objectspace.com.