Vitria Technology Inc is gearing up to introduce two new products which will enable developers to more easily write applications for – and integrate existing programs with – the company’s Velociti publish-and-subscribe software back in June. The Mountain View, California-based company claims its particular version of publish-and-subscribe technology, effectively an event delivery service, enables companies to process business events on a real-time basis and deliver them to distributed applications across company intranets or extranets as they happen. Examples it cites include monitoring changes in a stock price or a trading risk position; tracking the location of a package or incoming customer calls. Vitria says the new products – codenamed Ice and Martini – will enable this event information to be processed and used by decision support applications and for existing application business logic to be extended to incorporate Velociti services. When it says Velociti’s targeted at delivering business event information in real-time, it means in second and sub-second time scales, not the millisecond operation of embedded devices. Vitria says that Velociti supports millions of channels and tens of thousands of events per second, plus security and manageability. The company also claims that Velociti and the forthcoming products deliver a range of capabilities which position it at a higher level in the technology chain than more fundamental plumbing architectures such as IBM Corp’s MQSeries asynchronous messaging software, Tibco Inc’s TibNet publish-and- subscribe system or Marimba Inc’s push technology-based software distribution services. It’s trying to create the impression of having created a new generation of publish-and-subscribe technology and uses its management credentials to support this perception. Co-founders CEO JoMei Chang and CTO Dale Skeen also co-founded Teknekron Software Systems, now called Tibco, the pioneer in publish-and-subscribe technologies. They hold patents for publish-subscribe and multicasting technologies. Forte Software co-founder Jay Shiveley is SVP sales and marketing, while Java creator James Gosling has been attracted on to its advisory board. Vitria had planned to announce Ice and Martini at the recent Java and Internet Business Expo show in New York, but was scared off by the prospect of being pigeon-holed a pure Java play, which it’s not. It can be utilized by Java programs, also supports C++ and implementation of the Object Management Group’s IDL Interface Definition Language. Velociti uses a home-grown OMG Corba object request broker to deliver events, but says it can also work in conjunction with an organization’s existing choice of ORB where required. It says it will put Velociti up on Microsoft Corp’s Distributed COM once it becomes more widely adopted. It already offers a Velociti publish-subscribe cartridge written in Java for Oracle Corp’s Web Application Server.
