09/13/2004

Digital Harbor, a provider of composite application software, and Librados, Inc., a company known for changing the economics of the application adapter business, today announced that Digital Harbor will standardize its suite of adapters to ERP systems and legacy applications such as SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel, Oracle and others by incorporating software from Librados that uses the Java Connector Architecture (JCA) to make information integration easier and faster.

"Our approach to composite applications starts with the users, not with the data. This 'top down' approach to integration helps users to see the links between pieces of information in different systems so they can make better decisions," said Austin Wells, vice president of product management for Digital Harbor.

"Because Librados makes it easy to access the data, Digital Harbor can focus on what the data means and how it is related rather than on the plumbing required to access it," he said.

The companies said that JCA adapters make integration easier and faster by providing a standards-based interface to existing datasources. With Librados, pre-packaged adapters are available for SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel, Oracle, and other applications. By leveraging the adapters for physical data access, Digital Harbor says they can now focus its innovative technology on the semantics and relationships required to logically link information stored in ERP systems and legacy applications with other information types and sources.

For example, a user processing an order can not only access the purchase order information from SAP, but can get a complete picture of the situation by linking to related information like the customer’s credit information from a Web service call, the customer’s history from a legacy database, the customer’s service level agreement document on the Intranet and the business process status from a workflow.

"This combination is very powerful and shows why changing the economics of the adapter business makes sense: Librados provides the standards-based connectivity that allows innovative companies like Digital Harbor to focus on the information architecture which sits on top," said David Richards, chief executive officer at Librados. "Providing adapters to access the information makes life easier for the developers, while providing the semantics to link it across many systems makes the information more valuable to users."

About Digital Harbor’s PiiE

Digital Harbor’s PiiE platform provides the missing pieces required to connect back-end systems together and deliver them to users in an interactive composite application. The platform fills gaps in today's enterprise software stack with EII, Ontology, and Smart Client technologies that enable business analysts to fuse information from multiple sources and enable business users to consume the resulting applications seamlessly in a live interface. Built on J2EE and XML, PiiE is designed to enable enterprises to extract more value from their existing information, and to help IT departments reduce IT budgets and application development time.

For more information, visit www.Librados.com and www.digitalharbor.com.