Fiorano takes component approach to EAI

FIORANO SOFTWARE IS a startup company that is leveraging a component architecture to compete against established players in the EAI (enterprise application integration) space such as IBM and Tibco. Led by CEO and CTO Atul Saini, Fiorano has quietly amassed 200 customers for its Tifosi application integration platform. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Saini talks about how Fiorano's architecture creates a low-cost graphical platform for just about any integration project.

InfoWorld: What does Fiorano provide, exactly?

Saini: We're selling a very comprehensive layered platform based on JMS [Java Messaging Server]. One component is the message bus itself. The second set of components [is] peers running on each node of the network that support distributed dynamic deployment of applications or application components. So they also have support for presence, availability, and the scheduling of distributed transactions. Our platform is general enough not only to do EAI business process management and b-to-b related applications, but the same platform can be used to build highly collaborative applications.

InfoWorld: How difficult is it to deploy this architecture?

Saini: Let's say you build a chat component and then you want to create a chat application or a collaborative application; you can reuse that component across multiple applications very easily. The whole platform, literally, from a developer standpoint only has two APIs, so you can use the tools out of the box. You build your components using existing tools and existing IDEs. So if you don't want to use just Java, you can use C or C++. We even have people building components in Visual Basic. And a non-programmer can actually take existing components, drag and drop them onto a screen, and link them to another application. With our approach, you need zero consulting. The whole concept is to drive down the cost of the consulting.

InfoWorld: How does that work?

Saini: The programmer or the developer of the component only lives within his own component world. So now the process of assembling an application is distinct from the process of creating the components themselves.

InfoWorld: How do Web services fit within your architecture?

Saini: If you look at it, Web services [are] nothing but a software abstraction. We have a very simple wrapper for Web services that is extremely effective. On my screen, I can drag, drop, and connect to any Web services component, and suddenly I have dynamically composed an application which is taking data from one Web service in Los Angeles, processing it on some machine, and sending it to another Web service in New York. It can then pull together data and send it to a Web service in Denver. And then on to a Web service in Tokyo that is an Excel spreadsheet sending a report to London. And you can do it all sitting in San Jose, [Calif].

InfoWorld: How do you handle security in that model?