Candle's Enhanced Roma Family Provides One-Stop Shopping for Enterprise Application Integration; Roma Evolves as an Enterprise Integration Platform.

SANTA MONICA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 16, 1999--Candle Corp., the leading independent developer and supplier of Solutions for Networked Businesses(tm), Tuesday announced additions and upgrades to its Roma(tm) family of Enterprise Application Integration solutions.

The new Roma products and the enhancements to the flagship Roma Business Services Platform (Roma BSP(tm)) deliver business-process automation, message brokering, development facilities, a component platform and application integration management tools. Together, these solutions combine to evolve the Roma suite into an enterprise integration platform.

Candle's Roma family allows customers to be responsive to today's heightened competitive pressures. Reducing application development time, leveraging existing skills and legacy applications, linkages to ERP and customer relationship management packages, and building it all with a business process or business services view, are just some of the ways customers can use Candle's new offerings to achieve business agility.

"In today's Enterprise Application Integration market, there often is a piecemeal approach to solutions that customers then have to integrate together," said Tony D'Errico, vice president and group executive, Candle. "If customers are already under time pressure to integrate their business applications, then they certainly don't have time or resources to integrate their integration middleware.

"Candle's Roma family takes the evolution of EAI to new heights, introducing a true Enterprise Integration Platform for business agility," added D'Errico.

Newly equipped with an open integration broker, graphical development environment, system-management capabilities and packaged application connection interface to SAP(R) R/3(tm), the Roma family comprises the following products: Roma Business Services Platform (BSP) 2.0, Roma Broker, Roma Developer, Roma Application Manager and Roma Connector for R/3.

Roma BSP 2.0

Roma BSP 2.0 provides improved transport support, language connectors, repository support, an enterprise component platform and business-process automation. The base transport provides support for HP-UX, which is broadened from currently supported operating systems: MVS, Windows NT, AIX and Sun Solaris. Version 2.0 also supports a series of new programming languages, including C++ and Active X.

An enterprise component platform facility in Roma BSP 2.0 lets users easily reuse business components that are legacy (CICS/COBOL, MVS Batch COBOL) or packaged applications (ERP applications, such as SAP) across the enterprise -- even on a real-time transactional basis. The Roma repository and directory support -- which utilizes LDAP -- now has expanded scalability via replication.

Roma BSP's new business-process automation facility lets customers easily define -- via a Java-based GUI -- application workflows that are composed of business components. The Roma business-process automation facility is implemented on a networked basis (vs. hub or server basis) so that business processes can be executed across different servers, applications and geographies.

"The Roma family slashes the costs and eliminates programming- skills obstacles associated with developing, connecting and integrating applications," said Aubrey Chernick, chairman and chief executive officer, Candle.

"In today's volatile business climate, change is the only constant. An organization's ability to support new models for doing business is the key competitive advantage. Roma will help organizations focus on their business objectives -- not simply on their technology needs," added Chernick.

Roma Broker

An open integration brokering platform, Roma Broker leverages best-of-breed middleware, such as IBM MQSeries and leading transformation and routing engines, such as NEON MQIntegrator and TSI Mercator, to make it quicker, easier and cheaper to enable communication between multiple business-critical applications.

As Roma Broker plugs into multiple transformation and routing engines, organizations can select and deploy the translation product that best supports their requirements -- based on the deployed infrastructure and future development path.

The fact that Roma Broker supports all major transformation and routing engines allows it to deliver truly open any-to-any integration -- linking any combination of installed in-house, new in-house, installed packaged and new packaged applications to support required business functionality.

Roma Developer

Roma Developer is an intuitive, graphical programming environment that reduces training barriers, empowering users to create applications without needing to understand Roma programming interfaces. Using Planetworks' Interspace technology, Roma Developer automatically creates the code necessary for communicating with business services via Roma.

Application developers, working in Windows desktop environments, such as Visual Basic or PowerBuilder, can access server applications via Roma without ever being exposed to the middleware.

Roma Application Manager

The fact that EAI can create a solution to link heterogeneous, distributed applications across the enterprise to fulfill a business function is necessary, but not sufficient to address the total business challenge. The translation and routing complexity associated with loosely coupled EAI configuration can make it difficult to understand where a business process is actually being executed.

End-to-end performance degradation of such systems can render the solution functionally useless.

Roma Application Manager provides visibility into total business function and flow, as well as component response time and load-balancing capabilities. Flow control and response time visibility are required to identify bottlenecks. Load balancing helps optimize end-to-end application performance. Furthermore, visibility into total response-time provides metrics to manage system infrastructure to assure baseline service levels.

These facilities, which are only possible through an Enterprise Integration Platform such as Candle's Roma family, make EAI both relevant and credible in business-critical environments.

Roma Connector for R/3

Roma Connector for R/3 is the first in a series of packaged application interfaces providing out-of-the-box integration to key installed business applications. The connector interface allows organizations to link Roma directly with SAP R/3, eliminating the requirement for custom interface programming.

Candle will continue to develop and deliver connector products to link Roma to the industry's leading business applications.

About Candle

Candle, of Santa Monica, is the leading independent developer and supplier of Solutions for Networked Businesses.

To help customers connect, integrate and manage their applications, Candle offers products, solutions and services in the areas of application integration, application and response-time management, messaging middleware, and performance and availability management. For more information on Candle and its Roma family, visit www.candle.com or call 800/843-3970.

Note to Editors: SAP is a registered trademark and R/3 a trademark of SAP AG. Candle, the Candle logo, Solutions for Networked Businesses, Roma, Roma BSP and ETEWatch are trademarks or registered trademarks of Candle Corp. Other products mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners.