Primordial, Grand Central Sign Web-Services Pact

• By Matt Migliore
• 10/16/2001

Under terms of the agreement, Primordial becomes a Grand Central consultant, integration and technology partner. Primordial consultants will be trained on the Grand Central platform, and will have early access to the company’s next-generation technology. And Primordial will resell the Grand Central Web services network to its customers under the designation of Primordial’s Web services proxy server, which acts as a broker and network gateway.

George Weihs, co-founder and CTO of Primordial, says “Grand Central solves a very interesting problem” for his company. Describing Grand Central's technology as akin to a value-added network, Weihs says it provides Primordial’s customers a single point of contact for exchanging messages with their business partners.

"What [Grand Central] has built is really amazing,” says Weihs. “They’ve done a beautiful job of interpreting the standards and taken a lot of the grunt work out of Web services.”

Grand Central’s network receives messages from Internet-enabled applications, and converts them into appropriate formats before sending them to their destination. For Primordial, this capability helps it get its customers up and running in a Web services environment much more quickly.

Launched as a consulting firm in 2000, Primordial is primarily focused on Web services implementations. “We try to coach our customers into a services architecture,” says Weihs.

Currently, Primordial is working on three Web services-related projects. “But there are a lot of people talking about it,” says Weihs. “We’ve got a lot of things in the pipeline waiting to pop.”

Weihs says most of the Web services projects he sees involve internal deployments. “A lot of organizations are really using Web services as a way – within their own four walls – for doing enterprise application integration.” But Weihs believes Web services will eventually be used for more business-to-business integration. “It’s just part of the natural progression of the way [Web services] will be adopted.”

Primordial’s relationship with Grand Central, Weihs believes, puts it in good position to handle the requirements of its customers as b-to-b integration becomes more prevalent. Weihs estimates the enterprise community will start to see a lot more b-to-b messaging scenarios by next summer.

Weihs cannot confirm whether or not the agreement with Grand Central is exclusive, but says, "Strategically, they're the only company that we've got anything going with right now."