Update: Commerce One tunes Conductor for integration

Commerce One is attempting to re-establish itself on the enterprise road map with an application integration platform that seeks to redefine the role of internal developers.

With the release of Commerce One Conductor on March 24, the Pleasanton, Calif.-based company will also address the limitations of application-centric integration with a platform built around abstracting business processes.

The move comes as competitors including SAP, Siebel, Oracle, and PeopleSoft continue to embrace Web services to create composite applications. Architectures such as SAP's NetWeaver, Siebel's UAN (Universal Application Network), and PeopleSoft's AppConnect have been variously pitched as horizontal platforms that unite enterprise applications. As a result, composite applications have emerged as an efficient, cost-effective alternative to expensive integration projects through the use and reuse of existing application components and data.

But according to Commerce One executives, enterprises still require a platform such as Conductor that can easily build, manage, and orchestrate composite processes.

Underpinning the platform's design is a belief that, in the future, an enterprise's internal business analysts will be able to undertake more of the integration functions than more expensive, specialized programmers.

"What we see is the empowerment of the business analyst," said Narry Singh, Commerce One's senior vice president of marketing.

Conductor is designed to abstract business processes and workflow from integration technologies, changing the role of the IT department and the business analyst by masking the complexities of building composite applications, Singh said.

Sanjay Chikarmane, Commerce One's vice president of product solutions, explained that the company is attempting to create light application logic that fills in the gaps between existing enterprise applications.

"With package applications, you have application-specific processes that are particularly locked within the application, whereas with composite processes you have a business orchestration process which is separated from the application," Chikarmane said.

Analysts using Conductor's Graphical Process Builder and Design Center can create schematics with a simple UI that defines an application's workflow and processes, according to company executives. This workflow process is then executed as an application using Conductor's central registry, which stores the components used to create composite applications. The Registry also controls the CIE (Collaborative Interoperability Engine), the CPM (Conductor Process Manager), and the platform's Systems Management components.

"Conductor, in a nutshell, is a unified service-oriented platform for creating composite processes," Chikarmane said.

Commerce One's approach differs from that of competitors such as SAP and Siebel, which are developing application-centric integration platforms. Executives from both companies claim that enterprises are more interested in acquiring specific applications than an integration platform.