DS: It has been busy, Gian, but I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you and your community.

GT: We certainly do, also. On March 19th, you unveiled Business Accelerator™, an open agnostic enterprise-class integration suite built from the ground up for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA). You say that Business Accelerator's new features help in implementing the "right" technology. And that begs the question -- what kind of business needs are determining the right SOA technology at this stage of development?

DS: Okay, Gian, that's an excellent question. When we went out and surveyed customers, we saw that there were a few things that they were looking for in SOA technology. First, they came with SOA with particular problems in mind, and wanted to choose a tool fit that solved those particular problems. Some of these problems were building a portal, for example. Or others were developing maybe a new application code. But we saw a substantial number of customers looking for new ways of bringing home business processes, which required business process management and integration-centric technology.

So the first thing they said is, what they wanted to do was to be able to make sure that they would bring the right tools for the job with the right functionality. The second thing that when we went out and really engaged in the market in this, was that customers wanted to be able to choose tools that could leverage what they had done so far.

Most people, most customers are well into the SOA adoption curve. They already have technology in place. And they would like to be able to leverage that technology and so many times they go to vendors and they find that if they want to buy a component, they have to buy the entire SOA stack. That would log them in and now allow them to leverage their current investment. So that was another issue that we saw.

The third was also making sure that they had tools that could grow with them. And they were sort of caught between from what they saw two different types of tools. One that allowed to implement quickly and deploy quickly but maybe not be able to scale up, if the project was successful, scale up to an enterprise scale. Other tools had the proven enterprise salability but were often hard to deploy to begin with, and again often came with proprietary SOA stacks associated with them so you had to buy into their architecture to do that.

GT: Okay. More specifically, how does Business Accelerator address these needs and find, what I guess you might call a "sweet spot" between all those parameters you just described?

DS: Business Accelerator is an integration suite based on SOA. It has strong integration technology and strong BPM. That has been our historical focus here at Vitria because that's what we do well, what we would call our DNA, so that's what we decided to focus on for traditional toolset. But we also decided to bring this technology to market with a twist. We call it the first open, agnostic and complete SOA integration suite. And those words have meaning with respect to the problems I just spoke about.

First of all, by being open, we allow our technologies, our components to be used with other SOA technologies. We, moreover, allow these technologies to be used for strong ecosystem partners that we have certified against. So the idea there is to make sure that customers could leverage their current investment and technologies, as opposed to buying a new product suite that contain all of the of the SOA technologies. That was the first thing.

The second thing that we decided to do, was the agnostic. We allow that our SOA product to be deployed on top of other SOA platforms, specifically app servers and ESB. Again, this goes back to the idea that customers really want to be able to leverage what they are using today as opposed to having to buy the platform. Moreover, this also allowed our customers to go to market quickly with current technology they have in place, even though they know over time they may have to evolve this technology. Also, again according to the information we got, Gartner for example estimates, that typical SOA enterprise experiment with SOA will not have one SOA environment but anywhere from three to more, and these environments typically have to be maintained separately. You have to develop solutions independently on each of these environments. What we decided to do with the agnostic concept, was to allow that our technology and solutions built on our technologies to be deployed into multiple environments, what we call one-click deployment to these environments.

So, for example, if you have a JBoss environment in one geographic region, maybe a WebSphere environment in another geographic region and maybe a WebLogic environment in yet another region, still, instead of having developed three different integration solutions and deploy them into three different environments, what we allow you to do is to develop it once and deploy it in those three environments. So that our customers can again truly leverage their current investment, and in the future, if they need to change their deployment environment, they can change that as well.

So this is what agnostic gives our customers. And the third thing, is really the completeness of the product suite. Again, what we have put into the product suite is based on our 12-year history building integration BPM tools. We have a complete set of functionality that can scale. We have developed technologies that are used by some of the major banks in the worlds, running tens of millions of transactions per day.

Those are some technologies that have been packaged into our Business Accelerator, our new SOA integration suite. It's that completeness of functionality, the completeness that enables scalabitly that gives our customers the capability to choose our suite for a small project, develop it quickly, deploy it quickly because you're deploying to your existing environment, not an environment which we dictate, and then to scale that over time to a much larger environment.

GT: While at the same time, trying out different partners.

DS: Exactly!

GT: And you had mentioned WebLogic and a few others. I'm wondering, are there any other, other solutions that bolt up well to Business Accelerator?

DS: Well, we have a strong ecosystem of partners that we bring to the table. These include for example, RedHat. This includes for app server and for Middleware Messaging services. This includes, for example, AmberPoint for the management of Web services, and also working with IBM and BEA, companies which we have viewed traditionally been our competitors. But we think, in this new world, really we need to all be viewed as partners. So we have lined up, really, a very strong set of partners. This is part of the openness that we bring to the table.

GT: That's excellent! I've noticed you've also released Resolution Accelerator 3.0 to help process business exceptions and improve business processes in general. It seems to have, and -- the pun is intended here -- some exceptional features such as the "mass repair" feature.

DS: Unfortunately, for many companies, exceptions are not that exceptional, i.e., they occur more frequently than what one would like. And they are a major source of calls because a lot of time when exceptions occur, people have to get involved to fix those problems and they are a major cause of customer dissatisfaction, as you can very well imagine.

And when you are talking about exceptions, we're talking about exceptions that can occur at all levels of the IT stack. Exceptions, from, for example, a database going down or an application going down. That's a system exception. Or a higher level -- a Web service is not responding in time. Or even a higher level, a process for example, you submit an order. And that order needs to go through a number of steps. You need to check customer information, billing information, for example. Inventory -- do you have that in stock? All those are likely to be different systems and any point in that long process, something could fail. Those are exceptions and they need to be dealt with and need to be dealt with quickly and they need to be dealt with in a cost-effective manner.

And, unfortunately, with SOA, it turns out that the problem may even get worse than better, because with SOA, the goodness of SOA is more decentralized. And you have more choices of technology. But that also means that when something goes wrong because of the decentralization or because you're dealing with more technology, it may be harder for you to locate or even detect. Resolution Accelerator is the first product built specifically to address, in a systematic way, this problem of exception management. Again, tapping into all levels of exceptions, but specifically handling it at a business-problem level.

So, for example, if your order stops, then what you really want to be able to do is find some way to continue that order, as quickly as possible, so you don't lose that customer. And that is exactly what Resolution Accelerator is designed to do. Now this is not our first release of Resolution Accelerator. In this release, we have brought together some, what we can think of are some compelling new capabilities.

For example, there's a notion of "mass repair". What does that mean? Well, we find that a lot of times, many problems that may occur, for example, orders being stopped, may be the result of a single problem happening at a lower level. For example, an application goes down. Or, if you're an energy company or a power company, your first sign of a transmission line going down may be a thousand customer calls coming in. Now clearly, those thousand calls, you need to be able to take care of, but there is one underlying cause, and once you've identified that root cause, you'd like to fix it and then be able to make sure that those customers can be taken of, or in the case of an application going down and orders being stopped, those orders can progress nicely.

So being able to identify root cause and then being able to restart all the processes that were involved in the effects of that root cause, resolve that error at that point, is what mass repair is about. The best one of the critical new features inside Resolution Accelerator 3.0, which we have now tweaked. The second capability that is important is Resolution Accelerator runs on top of Business Accelerator, the product I spoke about to begin with. What that means now is that the open and agnostic architecture that we discussed originally, and the benefits that it provides, is now part of Resolution Accelerator.

That means that you can go into an environment with Resolution Accelerator and leverage your current SOA infrastructure. You don't have to rip and replace, you don't have to install a new stack. You can really leverage what's there. That's part of the open agnostic capability which is inherited because Resolution Accelerator is built on top of Business Accelerator.

GT: There are some excellent capabilities and again, the interoperability, that's key. So, Dr. Skeen, you could safely say that both your products are applicable at just about any stage of an SOA deployment?

DS: Yes, that would be correct. If you look at -- and we see, customers at all stages of SOA development -- some industries especially in the telco industry and the financial services industry have been early adopters at a very mature stage. For those types of companies, what we find is that the openness of the architecture really helps. The openness allows them to take this functionality and really leverage their existing investment but to specifically solve some of their key problems, for example, automating their enterprise business processes.

A key task is required in it by many SOA implementations that indeed enable them. And so we allow them to have the right tools and also exception management. At that stage, they will probably already have some sort of governance tools in place and SOA Web service management tools in place for that. And those tools can provide the feedback into our, sorry, our Resolution Accelerator product. It will allow them to then get better insight into the effects of many exceptions that occur on the Web service level. So we can really leverage the tools that really come into play and take it from just managing exceptions at the service level to really managing the exceptions at a business level.

So, these companies can really leverage the benefit that we see in being an open platform. In the agnostic side as well, these companies can take advantage of the fact that they probably do have multiple SOA environments, and they would like to rationalize them, perhaps reduce them to one or two. And again the agnostic capability in both of these tool set which allows you to deploy on multiple platforms and then change your platforms after you deploy it, can be leveraged as well for these more mature ones.

Now, we see some industries though, for example, like healthcare services. They are just at the beginning of SOA adoption. And this is where the completeness helps them. Because we bring together not only complete integration tool set but a complete ecosystem of partners that can out of the box provide a total SOA solution. So with these customers, what they can do, is they can choose to, instead of having existing technology that they can leverage, they can choose just to use the technology out of the box and focus only on the problem they have.

So bringing business value much more quickly to the problem. And then because we are an open environment and that we are agnostic, that means later on if they need to make a different choice, they are still free to do so.

GT: Okay! I think I speak for everyone, we're looking forward to the evolution of these rationalized platforms, and I hope that you'll be willing to come back in a few months and give us some case studies.

DS: It would be my pleasure!

GT: Okay, great, Dr. Skeen. In the meantime, where can our listeners go for more information on both Business Accelerator and Resolution Accelerator?

DS: I hear the best place to go is Vitria's web site. And that can be found at www.vitria.com. That's www.v-i-t-r-i-a.com

GT: Okay, one final question, Doctor: Can you explain the genesis of the name Vitria?

DS: (laughs)

GT: We ask most companies here without an obvious name.

DS: It's a long and tortured story…

GT: Which is why it was not the first question!

DS: (laughs) Essentially, Vitria was a derivative of Vision Integration and Technology, which was the founding name of our company. Our developers took that name and encoded all the libraries with VIT. And then when we decided to change the name of the company, they said they refused, they said they are not going to change a million lines of code with the VIT prefix. We had to choose a name that had that prefix. So we were sort of locked in by the fact that we were successful in some of our early development.

GT: Oh! That's not a bad name, and you know, it was going to send me over to the Latin dictionary to check but I think I think your explanation has headed that off (laughs). But I'd like to thank you, Dr. Skeen, and wish you the best of luck with all your products, under whatever name.

DS: Okay! Thank you very much!

GT: And just a reminder to our audience for more cutting-edge podcasts, webcasts, Webinars and virtual conferences, and white papers, the address is always www.ebizq.net Thank you.