Hummingbird Communications Ltd. unveiled its metadata strategy and announced Genio MetaExplorer. A fully customizable, Web-based solution, MetaExplorer is designed to support the information search and analytical needs of information consumers by providing access to all decision support metadata repositories within an organization. At the heart of MetaExplorer is MetaData Server, an intelligent middle-tier solution with a driver-based, plug-and-play architecture. MetaData Server enables dynamic access to the rich variety of decision support metadata stored within the enterprise. Hummingbird will provide drivers to access the leading industry metadata repositories in addition to providing APIs to build drivers for accessing other metadata repositories. Complementing MetaExplorer and MetaData Server, is the new Hummingbird Enterprise Repository (HERO) that leverages XML-enabled metadata access and interchange. With HERO, organizations can now move to a common repository of metadata that provides the architectural glue that binds together the various components of the enterprise intelligence environment. HERO will simplify deployment, improve scalability to an enterprise scale, reduce integration challenges, and ease the maintenance burden to reduce the total cost of ownership. Genio MetaExplorer is expected to be available in Q1 2000. www.hummingbird.com
Day: December 1, 1999
Staffware Plc announced an agreement with BEA, designed to give companies tighter control over their business operations across the enterprise through an off-the-shelf solution, while minimizing the amount of customization required for multiple applications to work together. BEA eLink and its options and adapters bring a range of high-performance connectivity methodologies, helping ensure secure transactions and transparent access to mission-critical applications and information throughout the enterprise and across the Web. Staffware’s portfolio of tools enables the rapid development of robust, highly scalable workflow applications for both client/server and thin client/Web-based architectures, providing a flexible, dependable infrastructure for distributing work among people and departments. The agreement provides for these technologies to be integrated to increase customer’s application integration capabilities, while expanding the scope of the two companies EAI efforts to include additional workflow features. www.staffware.com. www.beasys.com
Ariba, Inc. jointly announced a strategic partnership to provide end-to-end business-to-business e-commerce application services. Under the agreement, USi will provide Ariba solutions to mid-sized and large-sized companies through the ASP model. The comprehensive partnership includes product development, application implementation and management services, and cooperative sales and marketing. Under terms of the agreement, USi is a preferred ASP for Ariba solutions, and will introduce a new service offering based on the hosted Ariba ORMX application. USi will integrate the Ariba ORMX solution with its Internet Managed Application Provider (iMAP) portfolio as part of a complete eCommerce offering to its existing and future customer base. USi will actively market, sell, deliver and support this new service. Clients will pay a flat monthly fee to receive the Ariba ORMX application as an iMAP service while gaining access to the comprehensive functionality of the Ariba Network eCommerce platform. Suppliers to Ariba ORMX-equipped buyers can use USi’s sell-side e-commerce services to transact with buyers through the Ariba Network platform using the cXML (Commerce Extensible Markup Language) standard. www.ariba.com
Digital Creations announced increased interoperability between its Open Source Zope application server and Microsoft platforms using open standards. An early 2000 Zope release will include support for two protocols heavily supported by Microsoft, the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) protocol. Digital Creations is the creator of Zope. Zope is an Open Source application server for building high-performance, dynamic web sites. Zope runs on nearly all UNIX platforms as well as Windows NT, and can be used with popular web servers or its own built-in web server. Zope is free at www.zope.org, www.digicool.com
XMLSolutions announced that users of EDI systems can submit any standard X12 or EDIFACT document for XML translation by visiting www.xmls.com. XMLSolutions, after receiving the EDI document, will apply the XEDI approach to EDI-XML translation (www.xedi.org) and return to the user by e-mail, the XML representation of the EDI file. www.xmls.com
