NERD ON THE STREET

The Tuxedo transaction-processing monitor from BEA Systems is likely to get a boost from BEA's recently announced acquisition of NCR's Top End transaction server middleware. Although initially the two products will be sold singly, BEA officials say the company has every intention of integrating the Top End software with Tuxedo. BEA's arrangement with NCR does not exclude NCR from selling Top End or providing support for it when it's bundled with NCR systems. In addition to the merging of technologies, trading organizations will want to keep an eye on how BEA integrates Tuxedo with object technology, says a new executive at BEA, Mark Bowles, who is the former "Mr. TIB" from Tibco (TTW, May 25). BEA is very willing to join object request brokers (ORBs) based upon the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) to Tuxedo; no word yet if this effort will include the new Top End technology as well.

Active Software, of Santa Clara, California, has integrated the Elements Advisor/J multi-threaded, Java-based rules engine from Neuron Data into its suite of enterprise application integration/middleware software. The rules engine, which contains business logic, message routing and simple transformation capabilities, works with Active's Integration System, the new name for the ActiveWeb infrastructure. The latest version of Advisor will be available this month for Active's growing roster of third-party applications covered by the Integration System, which eases the exchange of information between a trading room event such as a completed trade and an application's native format such as a Sybase database record. Active recently added 23 adapters to its roster and now offers 38 gateways for bi-directional mapping of information for a variety of applications that cover mainstream, industry-specific and mainframe applications as well as middleware such as CORBA and IBM's MQ Series. There are also adapters for languages and development environments such as C, Microsoft's ActiveX and Java. Active and Neuron Data have had an OEM and joint development partnership for about a year.