Browser Technology Eases Software Integration Worries.

With the advent of XML technology and Web services, the days of an integration taking months to complete are long gone. Recently Entyre completed an integration with Dexma literally in a matter of a few days.

"Moving data back and forth with XML technology is pretty easy these days," said Chris Eagle, chief operating officer and chief technology officer at Entyre, Ann Arbor, Mich. "We set up a Web service and literally in less than a week Dexma was hitting it with data."

Mr. Eagle and Richard Beedon, the company's CEO, acquired Entyre for an undisclosed sum in a deal that was finalized last month. The company has been in business since 1987 and serves the closing documentation needs of lenders in all 50 states.

Founded in 1995, Minneapolis-based Dexma helps lenders and other industry partners compete more effectively by delivering technology solutions that streamline loan production and expand product distribution. This integration with Entyre spurred from the fact that the two companies had a mutual customer and felt that the technology was there to make the process painless.

"This new kind of integration with XML and Web services is a big change when compared to how integrations used to be done," said Tim Anderson, executive vice president, business solutions at Dexma. "Rolling integrations out as a Web service is a huge improvement over the hard-coding method that used to be the norm.

"In general, there are two different kinds of integrations, one for the upfront initial docs, as well as one for the closing data set docs," he said. "Normally, being that you were dealing with the largest data set in the process when you talk about the close loan dataset, the integration process is always different with each provider and LOS that you have to integrate to."

Now that has all changed. "The nice thing now in the new world is that there's a standard way to deploy the integration using XML as a Web service to deploy within weeks," Mr. Anderson noted. "Before it would take ...