SilverStream Advances E-business Platform

Application server vendor SilverStream Software made strides in defining its E-business platform Monday with three separate announcements: the acquisition of two companies and the formation of a new E-business division. First, the company revealed it spent $29 million in cash, common stock, and options on two acquisitions: GemLogic, an Extensible Markup Language integration server products vendor, and ObjectEra, a developer of Java technologies. The company also unveiled a new e-Business Solutions product division that will offer preconstructed application frameworks built on the company's Java 2 Enterprise Edition-compliant application server architecture.

"The new J2EE standard really defines application servers now. Users will be looking for vendors offering value-added solutions in addition to J2EE," says David Skok, chairman and founder of SilverStream.

The GemLogic acquisition will let SilverStream offer XML products for business-to-business commerce. Using the GemLogic technology, SilverStream will offer products that eliminate much of the programming necessary with current implementations of XML. While databases exchanging commerce information may speak the same language through XML, programming additional code is still necessary to map information from one system to another. The GemLogic technology uses a visual designer to map incoming XML messages to the appropriate location in the database.

SilverStream is already using the JBroker technology ObjectEra in version 3 of the SilverStream Application Server, which is in beta testing. JBroker, an all-Java object request broker, is expected to improve performance on the SilverStream Application Server through its advanced use of Enterprise JavaBeans. The goal of the company's newly created e-Business Solutions group is to help companies get Web applications up and running quickly by using prebuilt applications. The first product will be a framework for enterprise portals that will allow enterprise users to design their own personal home page with corporate information. "These three things are not isolated announcements," Skok says. "We have a clear and far-reaching grand plan for solving E-business issues."