Integrating Islands with Landmasses

EAI notes and thoughts

Saturday, December 31, 2005

Now an Integration Appliance!

I was reading literature on 's appliance for SMBs (Small and Medium Scale Businesses) and also attended a that touched upon the product. It offers out of the box integration through:
  • Integration software hosted at the Bridgewerx site
  • Appliance acting as the hardware
The first step is to design the integration at the Bridgewerx site. The integration software is a based web application and is available for a test run at the . The output of the design task is a file that has to be configured and deployed on the appliance.

After designing the integration at the Bridgewerx site, the (source and target) have to be configured and the integration can then be deployed on the appliance. For each environment e.g. Test, Production, a separate appliance would be required.

The Bridgewerx appliance is a Dell Wintel server running Windows 2003 Server, and SQL Server 2000. The complete specs are available at the site. The choice of a Microsoft based solution instead of an Open Source approach has been a little intriguing to me. But then, this could be due to the fact that most of my experience is with IBM and Java based .

In the webinar, a solution using the Bridgewerx appliance was explained. The scenario was integration of with an internal billing application of Bridgewerx's client.

is another appliances vendor which has a similar product - XI50. I could not get much details on its specifications, so will not be able to compare it with Bridgewerx's product.

Bridgewerx is clearly aiming at the cost-conscious SMB market with an extremely competitive pricing strategy. With IBM acquiring DataPower, it would be interesting to see how the competition in this market unfolds.

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