Commerce One Ships Conductor

Commerce One late last month shipped Conductor, the next step in the company's evolution away from its B2B origins.

Conductor, which Commerce One Chief Marketing Officer Narry Singh described as a "composite application platform," includes technology from older Commerce One products, technology gained in acquisitions such as that of software developer Exterprise, and new business-process management and EAI features and support.

"Rather than focus on being a packaged-application company, we [decided we] would try to find ways to provide infrastructure and functionality to be able to build out end-to-end processes that would be neutral to the underlying plumbing," Singh said.

Conductor is neutral to a network's EAI investments, its portal or other user front-end interfaces, and its messaging bus, Singh said. "It was our belief that this platform had to co-exist with the infrastructure investments already made," he said.

The Conductor suite includes Process Orchestrator, a runtime engine that lets users create applications using simple drag-and-drop procedures; Registry, for use in managing and storing user information, Web services and reusable data objects such as business documents; systems management capabilities; and other features and components.

Singh said he expects most Conductor deployments to start at about $300,000.

Sethu Nambiar, vice president of collaborative commerce solutions at Satyam Computer Services, a $425 million solution provider based in India, said the company's partnership with Commerce One dates back to 2000.

Doron Kempel says selling hyper-convergence can be challenging for solution providers, but success will come from taking business from competitors that are unprepared or hesitant to embrace the technology.