Built-in application services provide seamless integration with all applications throughout the enterprise; Application management service lowers cost of ownership and manages complexity; Universal client support enables customers to access any application, anywhere, anytime.

May 13, 1998 - Unify Corporation today made a strong bid in the heated application server market with a first-of-its-kind, enterprise-class "application integration server," specifically targeted to help large companies improve their customer service by giving their customers a single point of contact for all of their product and service needs-from any client platform they choose to use, including Internet-based Web browsers.

Unify’s new VISION AppServer is designed to rapidly and economically integrate legacy applications, packaged and custom applications, and the myriad of databases that contain customer information throughout the enterprise.

To provide broad and seamless integration with back-end legacy data and packaged applications, Unify VISION AppServer includes built-in support for IBM’s industry-standard MQSeries messaging technology. On the client-side, Unify VISION AppServer provides universal access so that any customer running on any system gets the information they need through a web browser running HTML or Java(tm), ActiveX or CORBA applications.

Unify VISION AppServer is an open, standards-based environment that can simply be deployed into virtually any enterprise environment with no modifications. Unify VISION AppServer was not designed to replace systems, but rather to quickly, easily and centrally co-ordinate and manage the required business components or services necessary to deliver applications that integrate any existing systems and information sources to serve customer service requirements.

Built-in business component framework reduces time to market

The development environment for Unify VISION AppServer is Unify VISION AppBuilder, an advanced component framework that enables IT organisations to rapidly create and easily modify server-based business components to support customer service applications. Unify VISION AppBuilder was designed to shield developers from the complexities of the underlying technology, enabling them to focus on the business components and business processes that make up the heart of their applications.

Unify VISION AppBuilder contains many powerful, pre-built classes for constructing server-based business components. For example, a service class is provided that automatically enables a business component to communicate with other applications and services independent of the underlying network. Interfaces to applications services are automatically generated without the need for developers to define and maintain custom-built, proprietary code. Developers simply need to focus on business logic; all of the various system-level issues, including operating systems, networks, transactional logic and data management are already built into the application server.

Central control and management functions enable server components to be accessed by all clients universally, while also providing connectivity to the data sources and custom, legacy, and packaged applications throughout the enterprise.

"Future-proofed" architecture adapts to technology changes

In addition to supporting components developed in C, C++, and Java, Unify VISION AppBuilder provides a high-level business language that allows developers to focus on defining business rules rather than on the complex, underlying technologies. The business language abstracts the notions of distributed computing as well as databases, operating systems, and user interfaces. The high-level programming paradigm allows complex business components to be developed and deployed using dramatically fewer lines of code, resulting in higher quality applications and faster time to market. Unify VISION AppServer’s dynamic, scaleable architecture enables applications built today to adapt to new technologies and changing enterprises of tomorrow.

Most other offerings in the web application server market are built around a client-centric architecture, forcing IT organisations to develop or deploy low-level middleware functions. Unify VISION AppServer is based on a unique, scaleable, server-centric architecture delivering comprehensive application and middleware services. This eliminates the need for an IT organisation’s scarce resources to deal with the complexities of middleware and application integration.

Seamless integration with legacy and packaged applications leverages existing investment

To provide comprehensive system integration, Unify VISION AppServer co-ordinates business services across disparate applications, protocols and databases. At each level of integration, Unify supports key industry standards that help orchestrate users and resources across the network.

Unify VISION AppServer allows business components to be developed that leverage and integrate with existing legacy applications seamlessly. For example, Unify VISION AppServer utilises IBM’s industry-standard MQSeries messaging technology to perform integration with a broad set of solutions including legacy IMS and CICS applications, IBM AS/400-based application packages, and ERP packages such as SAP R/3. Any MQSeries-accessible application can be easily integrated into application services, allowing immediate access to those systems throughout the rest of the enterprise. The integration can be performed without modification to the existing legacy system code.

Built-in application-management lowers cost of operations

Reconfiguration and modifications to underlying systems, applications, and network topologies are common as business needs change. Unify VISION AppServer provides easy, centralised administration and management of all services network-wide from a central management console. The central console allows operators to view the configuration of every application server on the network as well as dynamically start, stop, and manage services on those servers.

In addition, Unify VISION AppServer delivers built-in application instrumentation integrated with industry-standard management platforms, enabling application management from a central management console including transaction monitoring, performance monitoring, event management and software distribution.

Dynamic Scaleable Services provide high availability

Unify VISION AppServer delivers a high level of availability and scalability, offering sophisticated replication, load balancing, fail-over, and publish-and-subscribe capabilities, all based on a high performance, fully asynchronous messaging architecture.

Unify VISION AppServer employs dynamic binding and distributed name services, allowing application services to be located, added, and moved to any server without requiring reconfiguration of any kind. Application services can be replicated within and across platforms, increasing application performance and user productivity. In the event of a system failure, Unify VISION AppServer ensures continuous operation by automatically rerouting user requests to other available services.

Parallel Server Architecture maximises application performance

Inherent in highly integrated systems is the fact that many transactions performed by services require interaction with multiple underlying information systems. In many cases, these invocations could be performed in parallel. Unify VISION AppServer provides asynchronous messaging to enable services to perform several operations in parallel, either on a single or across multiple servers. This approach minimises transaction time and maximises server resource utilisation.

Pricing and Availability

Unify VISION AppServer and AppBuilder will be available worldwide May 1. Licensing for Unify VISION AppServer will be server-based at $500 per concurrent user. Licensing for Unify VISION AppBuilder will be $7,295 per application developer.

Unify Corporation - www.unify.com

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