Grand Central Communications aims to reach an ambitious target - integration-as-a-service. In other words it's an ASP EAI model. The company just closed series B with $ 28 million cash inflow but has only 10 announced customers. However the business model is very appealing. Grand Central Communications wants to free customers from lengthy and often very customized EAI projects.

"The Network is composed of a comprehensive set of services, which can be woven together to provide the connectivity, security, process execution, policy mediation and visibility required to deploy transactional business processes."

EAI frameworks with adaptors for your running software applications sold by companies like Webmethods easily reach six digit figure excl. customization for your data and business processes. The cost and complexity of EAI projects drive CTOs to even more homogeneity in the ERP applications.

Grand Central Communications has found some clever solutions to ease the pain. First you don't have to buy the integration framework.

"With GC Connect, you (and your partners) don't need to buy, install and support endpoint software, saving time and money. GC Connect provides secure, reliable messaging, with connectivity options that range from traditional file- and batch-based systems such as FTP and EDI, to today's standards such as XML/HTTP and Web services protocols. A wide range of legacy applications and connectors are supported, as well as web portals, application servers, desktop applications and handheld devices -- any software designed for Web services.

Second adaptors are not sold for i.e. $50.000 each instead they can be shared by partners or users with GC share:

"Grand Central enables businesses of all sizes to rapidly connect with their partners and customers, and create, share and manage reusable business processes on demand.

In a third step it supports BPEL:

"Using BPEL, a programmer formally describes a business process that will take place across the Web in such a way that any cooperating entity can perform one or more steps in the process the same way. In a supply chain process, for example, a BPEL program might describe a business protocol that formalizes what pieces of information a product order consists of, and what exceptions may have to be handled."

But definitely what's great and cheap software does not immediately sell easily and provide good margins. The Open Source approach makes it much more difficult to explain prices. But Grand Central Communications is lead by a charismatic CEO Halsey Minor, who has been personally invested on half a dozen of tech brands like Vignette, BuyDirect.com, Listen.com, Salesforce.com.

The key factor for the break-trough of the 3 year old startup will be the marketplace (or the ebay for EAI).

"But how would anyone find these business processes? That is where Grand Central hopes to play a bigger role. Starting in January, it will offer a directory and marketplace for business processes that operate on its network. It will connect systems and companies and charge for any data exchanged among systems on a per-megabyte basis (as it does today for systems integration). In this way, Grand Central hopes to become the network on which all of these business-process applications will reside, like an eBay (EBAY) for business-to-business apps. The task before Minor, though, is to build enough critical mass and network effects at Grand Central so that it becomes the de facto clearinghouse for swapping these processes."

"...IT consulting and services are constrained by how many people can be thrown at a problem (witness the tens of thousands of consultants now working for IBM Global Services and its acquisition last year of PriceWaterhouseCoopers's consulting arm). The ability to translate business processes into software code means that those processes can be built once and sold over and over again. Brainpower will become more of a currency than it already is, with every conceivable industry expert digitizing his or her knowledge and uploading it to the highest bidder. Now that's what I call an information economy."