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I recently caught up with Avigdor Luttinger, VP Marketing and Corporate Strategy at Magic Software at the IC Global Integration Conferece. Having listened to hundreds upon hundreds of vendor briefings, it's very rare that I come away thinking that the vendor has nailed the strategy. More often they seem to be chasing windmills. But in this case, I was extremely impressed with Magic's strategy, which seems to be working for them very well. Magic formed an alliance with SAP last Sept. to provide integration to the SMB market. Through that alliance they have 9 partners who have done three or more projects using Magic, 30-40 who are now in their first project, and a pipeline of 40 partners queuing up for training before beginning their first project. That's certainly a successful strategy.

Magic is also focusing on the AS400 market. This seems like an interesting niche as few other integration products even run on the AS400, and there are a lot of AS400s out there. Trouble is many of those AS400 shops are SOA laggards - they just don't get it yet. As a proof point, I sat with one at lunch. He said he really didn't see the need for SOA in his organization. Nightly batch using ETL tools is all they need or want. BUT ... they are starting to move towards BPM. When you start optimizing business processes, the usual outcome is the need to integrate stovepipe applications. I predict they will hit that wall pretty soon into their first implementation. The need for greater business agility is a great equalizer - hitting large, medium and small organizations alike.

Magic's iBolt will be a good solution for SMB or even ISVs. It's a completely integrated model and rules driven environment. Slick. If you're an AS400 shop and actully reading this blog you're probably ahead of the game. But if you are and want to argue about the need to SOA, I'd love to talk to you. As the Borg would say, I firmly believe that SOA is inevitably in your future.

Posted by bethgb at 10:45 AM in Vendor Briefings | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us