WDI, the forward-looking development division of Brunswick New Technologies, a unit of Brunswick Corporation, today announced the release of Redberri 6.0, a next-generation middleware technology platform that provides an open-standards-based integration suite.
Redberri 6.0 will help companies establish service-oriented integration to enable Web services and integrate data and applications across platforms with customers, partners and suppliers. Such services will save time and money, and enable IT staffs to focus on higher priority responsibilities.
Redberri takes incoming data from outside sources in whatever format these sources happen to use, and passes it to the organization’s internal systems for processing in their native format. Any responses or other actions that are required are translated back into the native format the outside sources use. The result is loose coupling of information, which makes it much easier to move data back and forth between systems – following a service-oriented architecture model.
“Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is emerging as the natural foundation for building applications with unprecedented flexibility, agility, and sophistication,” said Raj Rao, general manager of Brunswick WDI. “Redberri’s Integration Suite is designed to provide the capability for IT organizations to transform their business models from delivering highly customized one-to-one services, to building and managing reusable one-to-many, or many-to-many services.”
Redberri’s Map Builder feature eliminates coding by providing a point-and-click graphical user interface that makes it easy to draw the relationship between external and internal systems. Simple connectors let business users map the relationship between basic purchase-order generating software and the purchase-order processing system at the receiving company.
As the mapping is done by the business user, Redberri automatically generates the code to perform that task. For independent software vendors (ISVs), that means projects are up and running faster. Meanwhile, companies using the application don’t have to devote precious internal IT resources to something that isn’t part of the core business. It’s truly a case of IT serving the needs of the business.
Another distinction between Redberri and other integration software is that Redberri includes the source code as part of the software purchase.
“As much as WDI has tried to make Redberri a broad-reaching product, there’s no way we can foresee every eventuality and make it all things to all people,” Rao said. “If you want it to do something that it doesn’t do out of the box, users can change the source code to suit their needs. That’s particularly important as you start building your IT infrastructure around services. You can make any adjustments you need to in order to fit your service-oriented architecture, or other systems for that matter.”
Redberri also segments different functionality and uses only the pieces an end-user needs. For example, Lymeware, a solutions provider serving the telecommunications industry, said it was looking specifically for an XML translator. Developers there took the Redberri Map Builder and incorporated it into the firm’s ConnectGate product, rather than using all of Redberri’s capabilities. That’s something that cannot be done with typical commercial integration packages.
There are any number of components that can be used individually, or in combination, to help loosely couple internal and external, or even internal and internal information. Redberri can do the whole job, or pieces of the software can help solve specific data integration problems within a company’s own applications.
Redberri works as a secure Web services gateway in front of soft back-office applications. It also can sit between the Internet and your application to protect it from malicious intent.
