Salesforce Integration Now in Magic's Bag of Tricks - Page 2

Continued from Page 1.

Thus far, Magic Software's message seems to be gaining traction in the marketplace.

Platforms like iBOLT "represent the future of the service-oriented architecture/business process management (SOA/BPM) market, in which powerful and dynamic representations of business process and policy drive applications, and developers don't have to know the underlying platform APIs to succeed," wrote Forrester analysts John Rymer, Mike Gilpin, Larry Fulton, Randy Heffner and Jacqueline Stone in a study last July.

While faulting iBOLT for shortcomings in standards support "and some advanced features," the suite "scored well in built-in tools for user interface and business process management development, event management, metadata management, and composite application management, but it fell short in auditing, extensibility, real-time computing, backup/restore, and common metadata and patch management," the analysts wrote.

The iBOLT Progression

The news marks the latest stage in Magic Software's efforts to offer integration with the biggest players in enterprise software and services.

In 2005, the company launched iBOLT for the SAP ecosystem and, at the end of 2006, iBOLT received certification for SAP's NetWeaver platform. Luttinger said about 250 SAP partners now work with Magic Software.

"The key is predefined samples of popular processes that people can deploy in a matter of days and enrich their SAP applications," he said.

Magic Software then began working with JD Edwards, now owned by Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL).

"We took the same concept and developed a special edition" for JD Edwards, Luttinger said. Magic, he added, has "one of the very few successful platforms ... that runs native on the [IBM] AS/400", which he said a third of JD Edwards' 6,000 worldwide deployments use.

The latest move came after Magic discovered that many JD Edwards customers "wanted to get hooked into Salesforce ... that many Salesforce.com customers were looking to hook that application into existing, on-premise assets and many SAP customers were also interested in integrating with Salesforce," Luttinger said.

Since Magic Software already had the basic business processes available, "it was easy to hook a special version that exposes the Salesforce.com API within our mapping facilities and offer, very quickly, out-of-the-box functionality."

Luttinger added that the platform owes much of its popularity to its simplicity of use, which made it particularly appealing to the small and midsized companies using SAP's Business One ERP package.

"Many SAP business implementers are not very technical," he said. "They are more on the consultant/architect level, so the ability to use an integration tool that works on a configuration basis rather than one that makes you write code was very integral to its success."