Seagull Partners with Cordys for Web Service Orchestration

by Alex Woodie

Like other providers of legacy integration middleware, Seagull Software sees the impact that Web services and service oriented architectures (SOA) are having on how users interact with their host systems. Last week Seagull announced a new partnership with Jan Baan's software startup, Cordys, that will provide Seagull customers with new opportunities for hooking Web services together and managing their interaction.

Cordys is a young software company focused on providing tools to help users connect their applications using new Web services technologies. The company was founded in 2004 by Baan founder and former CEO, Jan Baan, and other former executives of the once high-flying Dutch ERP software company. Cordys, like Seagull, is headquartered in The Netherlands; Cordys American office is in Sterling, Virginia, while Seagull's American headquarters is in Atlanta.

Cordys' flagship software suite is the Business Collaboration Platform, a composite application framework (CAF) the company bills as one part enterprise service bus (ESB), one part business activity manager (BAM), one part business process management (BPM), and one part Web services orchestration. That's a lot of parts and acronyms, but integration is still a hairy business, which, unfortunately, still begets a certain level of complexity, although that is beginning to change in large part due to Web services technologies.

Basically, what Cordys' Business Collaboration Platform does is provide a playing field on which companies can establish their Web services within the framework of an SOA, and make sure that they're cooperating fully with each other and well supervised. The company and its software have been well received by analyst groups, including Gartner, which placed Cordys in the "visionary" sector of its Magic Quadrant rating system.

By partnering with Cordys, Seagull is providing its iSeries, mainframe, and Unix customers with another tool for integrating their applications using an SOA framework. Seagull's LegaSuite does the dirty work of taking, for example, the 5250 datastream and repackaging it as a callable Java or .NET component, with the necessary simple object access protocol (SOAP) code. LegaSuite can take a given iSeries business process (such as "check balance") and turn it into a Web service that conforms to the standards of today. What Seagull doesn't offer--and what Cordys will now provide--is an overall framework for helping Seagull customers manage many Web services.

"High performing legacy systems play a key role in most organizations, however, until now they have been limited in the role they can play in service oriented architectures," says Henk de Ruiter, executive vice president of Cordys. "Many of Seagull's enterprise customers have already published Web services from their legacy platforms and will continue and extend this investment by reusing these components in Cordys' powerful composite application framework."

Seagull and Cordys will be working together on sales and marketing initiatives, in addition to cooperating on technology.

The partnership with Cordys is the latest news from Seagull, which issued a flurry of announcements at the Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Summit 2005 in Los Angeles last week. Among the other announcements was the acquisition of mainframe middleware developer SofTouch Systems for $3.6 million in cash and stock.

The addition of SofTouch should significantly bolster Seagull's Web services story for mainframe shops. The Okalahoma City company develops a product called CrossPlex that provides a mainframe-based way to transform CICS transactions into Web services. According to Seagull senior vice president Andre den Haan, CrossPlex flat out flies. "The CrossPlex architecture yields blazingly fast performance like none we've ever seen," den Haan says. "We expect that CrossPlex will be very interesting to our installed base."

The acquisition adds 70 companies to Seagull's roster of clients, including companies like American Express, the New York Times, Dassault Falcon Jet, Columbia University, and the State of Minnesota. Seagull will maintain SofTouch's Oklahoma facility, which will be overseen by SofTouch's Richard Jones, who will be Seagull's vice president of development. SofTouch is a profitable company and the acquisition will be accretive to Seagull's earnings, according to Seagull CFO Mory Motabar. The transaction has been approved by the boards of directors for both companies and should close by the end of April.