Xcalia signs with Microsoft Idees

Research collaboration

For around a year service-oriented architecture (or SOA) has been one of the buzzwords in IT management. The idea is to make resources available on the network as independent services, where the user accessing the data is unaware of the underlying platform supporting each application. But to do that in large companies requires a lot of interoperability, and therefore bridges between environments such as Java and .Net, for example.

Founded in 2000 from research work conducted on behalf of France Telecom, French start-up Xcalia just joined Idees, Microsoft’s businesssupport programme for software developers and start-ups . Its task is to develop a .Net version of its software engine already running on Java J2EE.

Xcalia provides Java-based integration software to create dynamic transactional applications in composite environments. Its flagship product, the Xcalia Intermediation Platform (XIP), enables dynamic, unified access to heterogeneous data bases and services.

A kind of Google, this software engine resides between the business and data layers. Instead of searching for worded queries, it aligns various business processes with applications and manages the ongoing data and services interactions.

But most clients run Microsoft softwares, so Xcalia’s Java-only approach was missing part of the market, particularly at the front end. Similarly, most large companies’ servers run Unix, Linux or Java, so it was an important step for Microsoft to move toward the mainframes or the data bases environments at the back end.  

The idea behind Xcalia engines is to allow a more flexible and evolutionary database architecture by decoupling applications and data. With Xcalia’s software layer between clients and servers, the data sources may evolve independently of the clients’ environments. “Typically a client will be able to create an application taking its data from various sources like an SAP customers database, an Oracle inventories data base and a Peoplesoft CRM to aggregate those datas into a Java or .Net environment”, explains Regis Le Brettevilois, co-fonder and director of R&D of Xcalia.

Founded with €7 million by VC firms Innovacom, Esource, Cap decision and Iris Capital, XCalia will not receive additional funding from Microsoft, but it will have commercial and technological support from the company’s Technology Centre in Paris. The aim of the partnership is to develop a “mapper” that enables services applications developed in the .Net environment to be executed simultaneously with other services and data into large transactional applications.