Vitria brings Web 2.0 and high transaction rates to BPM with M3O

Vitria recently announced its new M3O product, which is claims to be the convergence of BPM, Web 2.0 and Event Processing. Bloor's Simon Holloway reviews it here, where he quotes Vitria saying:

• "BPM provides standards-based executable modelling (based on BPMN) on top of business knowledge Repository.
• Web 2.0 provides the rich user experience with zero footprint to enable a collaborative design environment.
• Event processing provides the support for rule and process definition and real-time runtime performance based on event driven architecture.
• Only when you combine these together do you get a fundamentally new user experience with multilayer visualization, collaborative modelling environment, business level abstractions and event management"

Leaping shamelessly onto a passing bandwagon, Vitria explains M3O as "think iPhone meets dashboards" (quoted from ebizQ). The idea is that the "iPhone coolness" of the Web 2.0 interface will remove the gap between business and IT people. Well, as long as it doesn't (like the iPhone) lock users into an expensive long term relationship...

This looks like the first fruits from the return of JoMei Chang as CEO last July and the decision to go private, executed last March.

Vitria is now private; Iona buys C24; Informatica Integration on demand

As I noted in October, Vitria is being taken private by its founders. Shareholders have now approved, and the transaction closed on 7th March.

This marks the end of a rollercoaster ride on NASDAQ (and by rollercoaster I mean there was a sharp climb at the beginning, but after a series of humps, bumps and loops you end up right back on the ground). Vitria's results over the last three years show everything gradually declining - revenue, assets, license sales. One positive - losses have also been reduced. Can Chang and Skeen turn the ship around, or is this just another step towards the sunset retirement home for distressed software companies?

Meanwhile Iona has picked up (London) City specialist integration boutique C24 for an undisclosed price. Given C24's small size - 12 employees - there should be no major digestion problem for Iona as long as C24's customers are kept sweet. Good luck to the C24 guys, a couple of whom I met while I was at SpiritSoft.

Finally, Informatica has launched the "first and only" on-demand data integration service. The "On Demand Data Replicator" - yours free for 30 days, and $1500/month from then on - is initially aimed at Salesforce.com customers; SaaS vendors like RightNow and NetSuite are next in line. The integration is (I guess) intended to be from your internal apps to your hosted apps, and vice versa.

EAI results - a mixed bag

Back to looking at financials, a note on Motley Fool that touts Tibco as a "king of cash" reminded me to poke around some of the EAI vendors' financial results.

Tibco's Q4 (ending November 06) was pretty spectacular, with revenue up 20% to $160 million - license revenue growth being a very healthy 32% to $88 million. But earnings over the entire year were barely up; Tibco seems to have a pattern of a huge Q4 after flat Q1/2/3.

WebMethods earnings show license income down more than 10% in Q3 to $19.7 million (total revenues $53.1 million). Motley Fool's article New Product, Same Problem suggests that digesting recent acquisitions (eg Infravio) and restructuring the salesforce are affecting sales.

Vitria's results show a startling spike in license revenue up to $6.7 million up from $1.8 million in the same quarter to Dec 2005 - around half of that accounted for by two customers. Encouragingly, Vitria is in the black.

Finally, BEA takes a bit of a beating - shares down 10% even though revenues were up 15% on same quarter last year. Why? because forecasts are down for next quarter (the analysts wanted $385 million, but management expects only $350-364 million).

A Morningstar analyst rounds it all off in the same news item by suggesting that BEA will get tough competition in the SOA space from Oracle, IBM and Tibco.

Vitria goes private

Once one of the great hopes of the EAI boom of the late 90s, Vitria has struggled over the last five years. Now I just noticed that they recently announced that they are going private.

The purchasers are Vitria founders Dale Skeen (current CEO) and his wife Jomei Chang (founding president and CEO). When Reuters bought Teknekron (which soon morphed into Tibco) they used their $10m to start up Vitria. As this 2001 story explains, Vitria's 1999 float was one of the more ebullient - priced at $16, hitting $273 just three months later.

Vitria was perhaps the first EAI company really to 'get' the idea of process level (rather than data) integration. Perhaps their biggest problem has been that their proprietary approach had hardly started to gain acceptance by the time industry standards - web services, service oriented architecture, BPEL and the rest - pulled the rug from under their feet.

Adjusted for stock splits, a peak price of $400 compares to a sale price of $2.75 per share. It will be very interesting to see what Chang and Skeen manage to make of the rump of their creation.