Probably. It does of course depend on what product XXX is and what options it offers for talking to and getting data from evolve™. Most products (those that provide any kind of data integration service at any rate) will in the most basic of cases allow you to import data in a text-file format (.csv, tab separated and so forth).

evolve™ can of course support all these and if the application in question needs data in a particular format, we can always write a custom report to do this.

At a more sophisticated level, evolve also offers a SOAP API option that allows developers and integration engineers to access data and data structures in evolve directly (and write data back in some cases), providing near real-time data feeds to third party applications. Our real-time integration with GIANT Services’ hosted back office solution makes use of this service to provide end-to-end placement to payment real-time integration between evolve and their back office pay and bill solution.

Because evolve™ is a hosted solution, we don’t offer any client side com object (or similar) integration between evolve™ and desktop applications - like old fashioned TAPI for example. Our security arrangements preclude querying the underlying evolve™ system directly.

We believe in using the right tools for the job. That means that we use a whole range of technologies, languages and platforms, each chosen because it is best-in-breed for what it does.

The evolve front end interface is mainly HTML, DHTML and JavaScript with Java used for a couple of components like the toolbar. We also have some local client applications (providing things like document management system integration) written in .Net/ C# and C++.

The back end is quite complex as you might imagine. All of our servers run UNIX of one form or another (we like to sleep well at night), with BSD (F and O) and Linux (Gentoo) dominating.

Core services are written using whole host of languages including C++., Python, PHP and Perl with Django and Cake providing 2 of the MVC frameworks we use.

Our main DB storage engine is MySQL, but we have our own proprietary query distribution framework written to sit above this (to allow multiple engines to be used in parallel), so we don’t use it as a stand alone engine as such.

evolve™ itself is not; however it is built around several key open source technologies which we use to deliver the system including Apache, MySQL, Python, Open SSL and of course Gentoo® Linux.

We are strong supporters of the open source principal too and have chosen to open source several of our own internal systems which have been given over to the community as part of a desire to make a fair contribution back. Our current open sorce projects include Flow- a comprehensive front end admin system for the Exim IMAP mail server; and contributions to the M2Crypto Python-OpenSSL and apache web server libraries.