Select Press Release

BOULDER, COLO. AND ATLANTA, SEPTEMBER 28, 2001 – Aonix, a member of the Gores Technology Group and number one provider of process and tools for design-driven component-based development (source Giga Information Group*), and ComponentSource, the world's largest marketplace for reusable software components and first to market as a software reuse infrastructure provider, announced today the details of a strategic technology partnership to advance component-based development (CBD) by accelerating software reuse practices within and across organizations.

As organizations reach maturity in their CBD strategies, the ability to “reuse” software component assets beyond a team level, has been a major, yet traditionally unmet, dollar advantage of component-based development.

“Over the past decade we have helped a large number of organizations migrate to CBD as their primary application development strategy,” explained Hedley Apperley, vice president of marketing at Aonix. ”The ComponentSource™ Enterprise Reuse Solution™ (ComponentSource™ ERS™) and Aonix Select Component Factory™ integration will now help advance their efforts so that they can start to increase the payback from component-based development by reusing expert written ‘off-the-shelf’ software component assets and internally built or acquired components beyond a team level.”

Licensed Web services
ComponentSource ERS is the first customizable, fully hosted SOAP and XML-enabled Web service-based reuse infrastructure combined with standards-based reuse best practices and over 7,000 reusable “off-the-shelf” component assets for evaluation and purchase.

Under the terms of the agreement, Aonix has licensed ComponentSource’s commercial Web services to integrate Select Component Factory, a model-driven CBD tool suite, with ComponentSource ERS via their mutually programmable APIs.

Aonix’s 700,000 strong worldwide customer base comprises software engineers, systems architects, systems designers, component librarians and project managers. The unique technology integration means that Select Component Factory users will be able to find, evaluate and “reuse” their locally developed components, previously acquired components and ComponentSource supplied “off-the-shelf” components, from within Aonix’s model-driven component-based design (CBDesign) environment. Because ComponentSource ERS is delivered via a set of core hosted Web services, the reuse effort becomes uniquely scalable extending the capability for Aonix customers to exceed cultural and geographical boundaries and reuse component assets in divisions and cost centers within and across companies. This is an advantage, which cannot be provided by current locally hosted reuse solutions.

Aonix will integrate ComponentSource’s commercial incentives-based Enterprise Reuse Approach with its CBD design and development process Select Perspective®, so that customers can achieve significant “reuse” at the start of their application development and dovetail their reuse practices with their CBD process.

“Our partnership with Aonix, a successful player in the CBD tools market, furthers our strategy to enable corporate developers to find, evaluate, and ‘reuse’ the building blocks of their applications within their chosen context,” commented Sam Patterson, CEO of ComponentSource. “Through our best practices and marketplace infrastructure we provide both the precursor and solution for large-scale reuse. Integration with Select Component Factory enables us to help Aonix customers apply economic values, commercial imperatives and incentives early on during their CBD maturity process and instigate the necessary cultural and organizational changes for long-term payback.”

“This partnership is very encouraging to see,” added Gary Barnett, Research Director at Ovum research group. “If organizations are to gain the true advantages of component-based development, they need to efficiently reuse their software component assets. Enterprises will use a variety of different development environments and tools. ComponentSource’s Web service-based, marketplace reuse infrastructure provides an easy means for CBD tools companies such as Aonix to exploit pragmatic, scalable ‘reuse’ capabilities for their customer base.”

Technology Integration
Aonix has led the field in advancing the shift toward component-based development with their model-driven process and application design tools. Aonix’s Select Perspective CBD process has evolved over seven years and is based on their extensive field experience. The process provides workflows for new application development, legacy integration, commercial application integration and component acquisition. The Select Perspective model-driven “Supply, Manage and Consume” approach is automated within Select Component Factory, which facilitates component design, solution architecting, component-based application assembly, deployment, management and maintenance. The tool set encourages corporate development teams to strategically plan dollar savings with the “reuse” of software component assets at application design time so that less code need be written from scratch.

ComponentSource ERS has evolved based on ComponentSource’s six years of global success as the largest marketplace for reusable components. ERS Europe Africa and Middle East division and the National Software Component Exchange for state governments have adopted the solution, which was launched in May this year. ComponentSource ERS provides organizations with a proven customizable marketplace Web services-based infrastructure and standards-based best practices to reuse their internal software component assets. The solution tackles “reuse” from a business, rather than technical perspective, by offering the commercial dynamics needed to fuel the collaborative exchange of components via the setup of private marketplaces and communities within organizations. The ComponentSource Reusable Component Specification™, a standard based on commercial principles (part of ComponentSource’s Enterprise Reuse Approach) forms the backbone of the solution, defining the information to be published with a component to assist its reuse by a third party developer. Moreover, the hosted infrastructure comes asset-rich, with the inclusion of over 7,000 expert-built “off-the-shelf” components in over 100 business categories, for evaluation and procurement, so that organizations are able to immediately reap the time and cost saving advantages of adopting reusable software component assets.

Availability
Aonix will initially integrate the ComponentSource ERS Web services that extend the “Supply” process of Select Perspective with Select Component Factory’s component management facility. This will make ComponentSource’s expanding supply of over 7,000 reusable components from over 600 expert component authors immediately available for evaluation and purchase within Aonix’s model-driven CBDesign environment. Availability is expected by the end of the year. Further integration with ComponentSource ERS is planned over 2002.

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