Public and private sector organizations of all sizes are adopting the Internet and other wide-area public networks for their mission-critical operations. The success of such e-business strategy largely depends upon reliable, secure and near-real-time inter- and intra-organizational exchange of information.

There are a few solutions, open as well as proprietary, which interchange messages among disparate applications or systems. Each one of these solutions has its strengths and weaknesses. Collectively, the existing information interconnectivity solutions have issues with latency, bandwidth and computing overhead, session encryption, status monitoring, stream processing, support for strong authentication, peer-to-peer relationship, event-driven processing, prioritization and file size limitations among others.

This document presents a brief survey of currently available message interchange solutions and how they compare with Beryllium, a solution currently under development at Adeptech Systems. How Beryllium addresses shortcomings within the currently available products are also described as well as its features and architecture. (See Table 1 below.)

One of the key design goals for Beryllium is to be scalable across a very broad range of file sizes, file types, traffic volumes, security models, and network topologies. This is accomplished by keeping overhead low, keeping the architecture efficient, delegating limitations and policies to applications, and designing in unique and important security features that enable new methods of interconnection.
The first phase of this message interconnectivity solution includes an efficient protocol, named Beryl, which is based on established standards, hence enabling its integration into existing environments. For example, this initial message transfer control protocol will use SSL for moving data as well as for session encryption. Beryllium is designed to interface between Beryl, the transport protocol, and other corporate systems. In addition to Beryl, the native open transport protocol, Beryllium will support transfer of messages over SMTP, FTP and HTTP.

Adeptech will make Beryl freely available with source code for most Unix flavors. A collection of APIs will also be made available for integration into any applications environment supporting TCP/IP. All technical information relating to the development of this message interconnectivity will be made publicly available including the source code.

Deployment of this message interconnectivity solution will involve minimal cost due to its simple and open licensing options and use of off-the-shelf software and hardware as the underlying platform.