We interviewed David yesterday and asked him our standard questions. Considering it was the first interview, we think it went OK...
There were a couple of interesting things to come out of the interview:
- Cape Clear markets itself as an ESB vendor, but its view of what is "in" an ESB is much broader than that of most other vendors - David in particular calls out BPEL-based service orchestration
- the sweet spot for the company is really a "mainstream", "mid-market" company which may not have much in the way of deep in-house web services or SOA technology skills
- the company is currently working quite a lot in software-as-a-service (SaaS) and other commercial service delivery scenarios - helping companies in the digital service delivery business create more sophisticated and valuable services
- David also specifically calls out the need for potential SOA "customers" to make clear distinctions between management of SOA-related technology, and management of the automated processes supported by that technology. These are two separate problems with different solution needs, and they should be evaluated as such
- it's pretty obvious from the conversation, we think, that Cape Clear is very firmly a technology company selling its capability as a standards-based middleware solution to integration problems. This makes it quite different from many of the other SOA players, which position themselves almost as business change agents.
