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From: www.itworld.com
Start-up speeds e-business initiatives
May 2, 2001 —
Considering the gloom around initial public offerings and technology start-ups in general, not many emerging companies are making ambitious claims about the future. But Asera Inc. CEO and President Warren Weiss is. He predicts that in five years, "we are going to be the next Microsoft" by selling software and services that help customers create Web-enabled business applications much more quickly and cheaply than they could before.
Asera's customers can deploy such systems within 90 days at a cost of $3 million to $5 million, he says. That's compared with months of work and $25 million to $250 million using conventional application integration techniques.
What does the Belmont, Calif.-based company have to back up its claims? For starters, it has 2 million lines of proprietary code, $175 million in funding and star power in the person of founder and board member Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems Inc. The company also has at least five onetime high-level Oracle Corp. executives, including former Oracle President Ray Lane, who joined the board last November.
Asera also has satisfied early customers. "We went from the kickoff meeting to having the [Web customer portal] up and running for our customers in just under 90 days," says Phil Underwood, vice president of administration and field operations at Wyse Technology Inc. in San Jose. Other vendors could have done the job, says Underwood, but they would have charged more and taken longer. "We wanted something that wasn't going to suck up quarters and quarters [of time] in management and implementation," he says.
Since launching its integration services in September 1999, Asera has signed 35 customers and wants to double that number by year's end, says Lane. But with the economy cooling, the company will add few positions this year and doesn't expect to be profitable until autumn 2003, he adds.
Lane says he wants to focus on top Fortune 500 accounts and relationships with key systems integrators that can prove Asera's technology can save customers time and money. "If at the end of the day, we have just 10 customers, but they are Ford, General Electric and Chevron . . . and three [major systems] integrators, I don't care about anything else," he says.
Asera's eBusiness Operating System consists of an integration platform (the business platform and development workbench package) and the Asera sell-side applications suite, which handles functions such as content management, order entry and providing real-time order status. The company offers both as stand-alone software or as hosted services.
Key Innovation
The integration platform is Asera's key differentiator. It consists of Java software components, application programming interfaces, workflow engines and application services that provide a unifying framework through which multiple applications can work together, says Lane.
The platform extracts key business rules, such as when to grant credit or reorder inventory, as well as data from multiple applications, and makes them available through Web-enabled applications.
Project general manager Michael Petillo chose Asera for the Chemicals Choice private Web marketplace run by the chemicals division of BP Amoco PLC in Naperville, Ill. The $12 billion global business needed to Web-enable several different versions of SAP AG's R/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) system as well as a legacy ERP system. "It was a fairly daunting challenge, and we wanted it done in 90 days," he says. Asera was able to "get the system going in the time frame we required."
It's the integration capability, claims Weiss, with which "we are two years ahead of . . . any of the big hardware vendors, software vendors, or systems integrators." Much as Microsoft Corp. has done, Asera plans to use systems integrators and other software providers to resell or bundle its technology with their own offerings.
Asera still faces the challenges of selling an expensive technology in a cooling economy, building a sales channel and getting its message heard in a crowded market. But it has credible spokesmen in Khosla and Lane and the compelling promise of a faster, cheaper fix to a decades-old problem.
Competitive Field
The market for enterprise application integration is huge: Framingham, Mass.-based IDC estimates that worldwide revenues for integration services alone will grow from $5 billion last year to almost $21 billion in 2005.
Asera faces competition in both the integration tools and services markets because it sells its e-business application integration platform as both software and a service. It also faces large, well-established competitors for its sell-side application for e-business.
Asera's strength lies in its underlying application integration platform, which "is unlike anything else you can get on the market," says Rod Johnson, an analyst at AMR Research Inc. in Boston. Asera also faces the difficult task of defining a new market, he says.
For all the risks, though, Johnson calls Asera "a business you would bet on in the long term if you're looking at development talent, management talent and the technology."
Among its major competitors are the following:
IBM
www.ibm.com
IBM sells application integration tools and middleware and the WebSphere Web application server. It also sells application integration services through IBM Global Services.
Electronic Data Systems Corp. (EDS)
Plano, Texas
www.eds.com
EDS sells application integration and development services to enterprise customers.
BroadVision Inc.
Redwood City, Calif.
www.broadvision.com
Broadvision's e-business applications offer similar capabilities to Asera's sell-side applications. On the application integration front, the company says its One-To-One Enterprise provides a "stable, flexible, scalable platform" that can easily integrate with legacy applications.
InterWorld Corp.
New York
www.interworld.com
The InterWorld Commerce Suite includes applications such as cataloging, personalization, retail merchandising, order management, business intelligence and customer care.
Computerworld