Yehuda, Israel-based Magic Software has joined as a WS-I contributing member, and said it will participate in several of WS-I’s technical working groups. The company said its flagship eDeveloper application development environment supports XML Schema, Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) standards, as well as J2EE and Microsoft .NET.

The WS-I was established in early 2002, by Accenture, BEA Systems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. It also had support from Daimler Chryser, Dassault Systemes, Reed Elsevier and Reuters, making WS-I the industry’s second major web services initiative after the Liberty Alliance Project.

Driving WS-I is growing concern that different vendors’ implementations of XML-based specifications, like SOAP, and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) will lead to vendor lock-in and inability to exchange business data.

Magic Software has not exactly rushed into membership of the consortium since it was first established in February 2002. The company was unavailable for comment at press time, but perhaps its late joining was down to the fact that it has suffered something of a downturn of late, with total sales for the third quarter ended September 30, 2002 of $13.82m, down 27% from $18.94m in the comparable quarter of 2001. Its net loss for the third quarter of 2002 was $2.16m compared with net loss of $2.58m in the third quarter of 2001.

Announcing its results last year, Magic Software said it would increasingly focus attention away from application development, perhaps facing increasingly stiff competition in the rapid application development space from the likes of Borland Software Corp and Microsoft, and concentrate instead on enterprise application integration (EAI).

On January 13, Magic Software unveiled the direction of this strategy, announcing iBOLT Integration Platform, aimed at small to medium-sized firms. It said it would be released in coming weeks, but there is no sign yet of an actual launch. It said it would also increase partnerships with consulting companies and systems integrators, and enhance its worldwide service team with follow-the-sun capability.

Source: Computerwire