Unisys Corp. said it plans to enter the nascent business process modeling market in June with a new service offering called Business Blueprints. The services will help developers in a variety of vertical industries develop high-level models of their software using blueprints developed by Unisys.
This kind of service should be useful to developers who are looking for an easier way to knit together applications from a variety of software vendors into a single business process, said Forrester Research Inc. vice-president Mike Gilpin. Unisys consultants will “first work with clients to design a blueprint of a particular business process using modeling tools built on industry standards,” the company said in a statement. The company will target a number of vertical markets with the service offering, including life insurance policy generation, claims management, voice messaging, and airlines reservations, according to the statement.
VoiceGenie unveils latest voice app tool
Toronto-based VoiceGenie Technologies Inc. recently announced what it calls a feature-extended release of SpeechGenie, which is designed to help the development and deployment of speech-enabled applications. This new version adds GenieBuilder, a graphical application development environment from Audium that allows customers to build speech-enabled services more quickly and easily than before, according to VoiceGenie. It’s based on the previous SpeechGenie platform, which includes the VoiceGenie VoiceXML Gateway and automated speech technologies from SpeechWorks International Inc.
It also includes: SpeechWorks OpenSpeech Recognizer engine; SpeechWorks Speechify Text-to-Speech engine, producing natural sounding synthetic voices that enable companies to deliver information in an audio format; and GenieBuilder, a graphical development environment optimized for SpeechGenie that helps organizations transition from proprietary IVR systems. VoiceGenie says SpechGenie is the first in a series of such tools from its partnership with SpeechWorks and Audium.
Borland makes its .Net nod official
Developers will gain new options for building applications designed to run on Microsoft Corp.’s .Net Framework and connecting those applications to systems in Java environments when Borland Software Corp. ships new products starting in June. The Scotts Valley, Calif.-based software maker plans to announce its C#Builder integrated development environment, which is intended to let developers make use of the .Net Framework’s class libraries. The Borland tool, due this summer, will feature design-driven development capabilities and native support for databases from Microsoft, Oracle Corp. and IBM Corp., as well as Borland’s own InterBase.
Also, Borland will announce a new product called Janeva that’s designed to enable client- and server-based applications written for Microsoft’s .Net Framework to integrate with back-office systems through the Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP). Due in June, Janeva is based on J2EE and Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) technologies.