Certus takes aim at smaller companies

By PETER GRIFFIN

IT services company Certus has spent $1 million setting up a hosting service aimed squarely at medium-sized and small companies that struggle with the cost and complexity of rolling out their own business integration suites.

Certus is basing its new service on its key partner IBM's Websphere Business Integration suite. It will not aim to host the software that businesses rely on - those applications will remain on servers within the customer's firewall. Instead Certus will specialise in middleware - integrating back-end IT systems and running business productivity applications that will allow businesses to make sense of the data passing over their networks.

Certus managing director Greg Woolley said business integration and so-called enterprise application services were usually hosted in-house but were the domain of large corporates.

"The problem is, it's quite expensive to acquire, especially for smaller businesses. We estimate it would cost up to $2 million for a company to put in the functionality we can offer."

Certus is running 13 servers in IBM's Auckland data centre, which will host the e-business software.

"We've set up our own infrastructure housed by IBM in their data centre. AT&T look after the firewalling and internet connectivity. Payment can be on a transaction basis or there can be a monthly fee for unlimited use," said Woolley.

Not surprisingly, IBM takes centre-stage in Certus' offering - IBM's DB2 database software, through to its WebSphere Message Broker Servers WebSphere Application Servers and Tivoli monitoring tools, and storage manger are supported.

"There's also some browser-based executive dashboard-type stuff," said Woolley.

Certus expected medium-sized companies to use Certus for business integration services until they became large enough to install their own.

The business integration sector is gathering steam overseas as IT dollars are increasingly spent on linking the disparate silos of information held across companies.

The Morgan Stanley survey of IT executives of Fortune 1000 companies for 2003 found business integration to be the area with the highest priority.