Vitria Technology is bringing business process and exception management together in a new suite of software for managing integration within a service-oriented architecture.

The company on Monday introduced version 3 of its Resolution Accelerator as a bolt-on to a new business process management suite called Business Accelerator. The latter is an overhaul of Vitria's integration platform called BusinessWare, which has been rebuilt for managing data flowing through an SOA.

Resolution Accelerator leverages the other product's routing, workflow, process management, and other components in managing problems, such as an application failure or other unusual events within an SOA. The software provides auditing and logging of exceptions, or errors, and the corrective action taken.

The upgrade also provides a graphical dashboard for monitoring and analyzing exceptions. In addition, the product includes rules-based, metadata-driven dictionaries that guide users through each step of classifying and routing errors.

The exception-handling component separates Vitria from many competitors, which include WebMethods, SeeBeyond, and Tibco. "That's traditionally been a problem area, and Vitria has built some unique capabilities for dealing with process-exception management," says Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst for ZapThink.

With Business Accelerator, companies can design processes through the software's Eclipse-based modeling environment. Within an SOA, a business process, such as order fulfillment, is automated by tying applications using XML-based standards. Data moving between applications is in the form of an XML document that Business Accelerator can parse, and transform the data into an acceptable format before sending it to the appropriate system, such as a customer information management system, a financial application, or a warehouse system.

The new product can also be configured to watch for unusual occurrences, and to send an alert to a manager when they occur. For example, a large order by a major customer could automatically be flagged.

Vitria does not bundle an application server with the product, preferring to provide native integration with runtime infrastructures provided by BEA Systems, IBM, and Red Hat, an open source software maker that owns the JBoss server. Vitria plans to offer integration with other infrastructure vendors.

IBM, BEA, Oracle, and SAP are among the major vendors offering BPM services within their software stacks. Vitria believes it can build a business around companies that want to avoid getting locked in to a single vendor's product portfolio, chief executive Dale Skeen says.

Whether that strategy will be successful, remains to be seen, Schmelzer says. "It's hard to say. Customers will have to prove whether or not they care about Vitria's agnostic capabilities."

Business Accelerator comes in ESB and Process editions. The former offers a lightweight enterprise service bus for small integration projects, while the latter includes the full suite. Pricing for the ESB edition is $15,000 per CPU, and the Process Edition is $40,000 per CPU. Both are available now.

Resolution Accelerator, scheduled for release at the end of the month, will be priced at $50,000 per CPU.