By Jason Stamper
At Staffware Plc’s International Staffware Conference in London yesterday, the workflow software company outlined details of a new eworkflow client, enterprise server, and Staffware STP/Process Engine for the vertical investment banking sector. But Computerwire also unraveled details of a new high availability workflow system being built through a partnership with an as yet unknown transaction processing (TP) monitor vendor.
The Maidenhead, UK-based company was more than a little coy about the new version, apparently code-named Staffware HA. But the company’s CTO Jon Pyke told us that, The new version will add the likes of dynamic load balancing and higher availability and reliability, by partnering with a company with TP technology. He explained that by using both the service and resource management of a TP monitor, Staffware will be able to deliver recoverable transaction queuing where a problem during the transmission of a queue of forms, for example, does not mean the queue or the forms are lost.
Based on that description, our money is on that mystery vendor being BEA Systems Inc. BEA’s Top End TP monitor, which it acquired from NCR enables the creation of services and applications that connect to legacy systems, multiple hardware platforms, databases, and operating systems for distributed transaction management, reliable file transfer, dynamic workload balancing, message sensitive routing, and recoverable transaction queuing.
In the meantime, the company also announced eworkflow, an HTML client for its workflow system. It has added a forms generator to eworkflow, which will generate HTML without any additional scripting or writing of code. Enterprise server, meanwhile, is really just the renaming of what was the server piece of the company’s client/server workflow system. The only substantial addition is the concept of a virtual client where the server treats a process from another application, like SAP or Oracle Financials, as if it were an ordinary user. This has the benefit of tighter integration with those applications, whilst avoiding the need for coding that was required previously.
Eworkflow should reach general availability by October, enterprise server is available now. Staffware HA probably won’t see the light of day until late this, or early next year. Earlier this week the company announced first half revenues had risen 16.4% to 11.2m pounds ($17.9m) on the same period a year ago (CI No 3,742).
