Fiorano takes component approach to EAI
CEO and CTO Atul Saini explains how Tifosi cuts the cost of integration and building collaborative apps
FIORANO SOFTWARE IS a startup company that is leveraging a component architecture to compete against established players in the EAI (enterprise application integration) space such as IBM and Tibco. Led by CEO and CTO Atul Saini, Fiorano has quietly amassed 200 customers for its Tifosi application integration platform. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Saini talks about how Fiorano’s architecture creates a low-cost graphical platform for just about any integration project.
InfoWorld: What does Fiorano provide, exactly?
InfoWorld: How difficult is it to deploy this architecture?
Saini: Let’s say you build a chat component and then you want to create a chat application or a collaborative application; you can reuse that component across multiple applications very easily. The whole platform, literally, from a developer standpoint only has two APIs, so you can use the tools out of the box. You build your components using existing tools and existing IDEs. So if you don’t want to use just Java, you can use C or C++. We even have people building components in Visual Basic. And a non-programmer can actually take existing components, drag and drop them onto a screen, and link them to another application. With our approach, you need zero consulting. The whole concept is to drive down the cost of the consulting.
InfoWorld: How does that work?
Saini: The programmer or the developer of the component only lives within his own component world. So now the process of assembling an application is distinct from the process of creating the components themselves.
InfoWorld: How do Web services fit within your architecture?
Saini: If you look at it, Web services [are] nothing but a software abstraction. We have a very simple wrapper for Web services that is extremely effective. On my screen, I can drag, drop, and connect to any Web services component, and suddenly I have dynamically composed an application which is taking data from one Web service in Los Angeles, processing it on some machine, and sending it to another Web service in New York. It can then pull together data and send it to a Web service in Denver. And then on to a Web service in Tokyo that is an Excel spreadsheet sending a report to London. And you can do it all sitting in San Jose, [Calif].
InfoWorld: How do you handle security in that model?
Saini: Because a component can be dynamically installed anywhere, we have a very elegant security model with many levels of roles-based security. Data transport between components can be encrypted at any level. And we have authentication at the application level, so that means if you log in as a production engineer, you may not be allowed to create a new component or deploy a component in a certain machine. You may only be allowed to run certain applications.
InfoWorld: So how does this change the way IT organizations should think about enterprise software?
Saini: There has to be a fundamental shift in thinking, and I am 100 percent convinced that this wave will catch on. Software can bend to meet the [needs of] business. There’s a distinction between the manager and the programmer here. We’re giving the power to the manager. It’s merely a question of looking at it differently. In our case, when you drag and drop components on a screen, those components are already pre-tested and they’re alive. If you click a button, the component is dynamically installed on the machine it needs to be installed on, and it runs. The application works out of the box.
