Vendor: Sterling Commerce

Product: Connect

UMB Financial Corporation has chosen a Sterling Commerce solution to automate the exchange of financial information with its e-communities over the Internet and private networks. Sterling’s Connect provides UMB a highly secure e-business communication infrastructure solution capable of accommodating the unique data delivery and scheduling needs of its customers, while seamlessly linking information flow with its back-end systems. The result for UMB is streamlined operations and enhanced service to customers.

“In order to compete successfully in today’s fast-paced, global environment, it is crucial for us to provide secure, reliable methods of communication for our customers, leveraging newer technologies such as the Internet. We are finding that more than 90 percent of our customers are moving to the Web to complete ’point and click’ business transactions,” said Joel Markus, senior vice president, UMB. “We needed a solution that allowed us to automate and manage the secure movement of information between our business systems and those of our customers – while accommodating diverse application, platform, and network environments. The Sterling solution offered just that.”

DANA CORPORATION DEPLOYS E-PROCUREMENT SYSTEM

Vendor: Ariba

Product: eCommerce Platform

Dana Corporation, one of the world’s largest independent suppliers to vehicle manufacturers, has selected an Ariba solution as part of its global e-business initiative.

“Dana has targeted significant improvements in supply chain management as a key business objective in 2000,” said Joe Magliochetti, Dana’s president and chief executive officer. “We have formed a global strategic sourcing organization and identified aggressive goals over the next four years, including a 50 percent reduction in the number of suppliers and $1 billion in cumulative savings in procurement costs and transaction expenses. The new global e-procurement system will enable Dana to utilize the Internet to gain a competitive advantage in the automotive supplier industry.”

The Ariba eCommerce Platform will help Dana drive economies of scale across its facilities worldwide by creating an internal e-commerce infrastructure. Divisional and corporate purchasing will be electronically aggregated from each employee desktop and directed through the Ariba Network to preferred suppliers at higher-volume prices. Anticipated benefits will include increased value with selected preferred vendors, significantly reduced transaction expenses, consolidated information on vendor performance, and reduced inventory requirements.

Banks and brokerages can use eDealer to streamline and lower the cost of FX trading, while also offering corporate customers the convenience and ease of 24×7 browser-based access. As an e-commerce or e-finance solution, eDealer works as an embedded API that conducts the currency exchange for making cross-border purchases or investments.

Optional clearing and confirmation services are also offered through Quilium’s partnership with CrossMar, the Citigroup subsidiary that already provides direct access to the SWIFT and CMS network to over 90 banks.

“Both markets are promising for us,” said Quilium CEO Alistair Davidson. “But the one that captures the most attention – from potential customers, partners, and investors – has to be the e-commerce angle, because right now there’s no good solution for processing FX transactions on e-commerce sites. eDealer processes the transaction more efficiently, and even quotes and bills in the customer’s own currency – reducing transaction costs and improving the online buying experience.”

“Because FX volume is so high – in excess of $1.5 trillion traded daily – we knew the bar was set as high as possible in terms of reliability, speed, and performance,” said Scott Duchin, Quilium’s Chief Technology Officer. “Our Java-based system utilizes the most robust technology available using Enterprise Java Beans in order to meet the demands of high-volume banking, e-commerce, and e-finance processing. It’s already proven itself with customers like HP and Amazon.”

Linux is a popular freeware solution that is distributed by a variety of commercial software vendors, including Red Hat Software. This UNIX-based, powerful, fast, stable and scalable operating system is growing rapidly and is one of the most popular solutions for server development environments and Internet providers.

“By providing e*ORB software that can be used with Linux, Vertel is making it easier for businesses to offer scalable distributed applications using e*ORB and Linux,” said Bruce Brown, president and chief executive officer of Vertel.

Information technology consultant EDS and electronic commerce services provider Ariba have teamed to create a business-to-business Internet market group. The joint venture, named EDS CoNext, will create markets that combine the buying power of participating companies, providing them with goods at cheaper prices.

Participants in the first Internet market group include 12 Fortune 500 companies and $160 billion in managed spending under contract annually. Expansion outside the United States is expected to begin in June 2000.

KNOWPOST.COM IS ’STICKIEST’ WEBSITE ON INTERNET

KnowPost.com, the premiere ’Knowledge Community’ launched in April 1999, said that their registered users averaged a total of 307 minutes on the site during December, 1999.

According to Founder Clay Johnson, “The numbers are impressive, but it’s the experience of being on KnowPost.com that’s the real news. KnowPost.com is an organic community – unlike so many of the sites currently being launched – built and operated by the community itself. KnowPosters are smart, involved sophisticated users. Their interests range from tech support to yak butter and they view KnowPost.com as a seamless part of their daily lives.” According to the December data, users average 11 minutes on the site in 27 visits per month.

What is KnowPost.com? Registered users post questions on subjects in a wide array of subjects and receive nearly immediate answers from more than 10,000 KnowPosters from around the world. Answers received are rated by the questioner and KnowPost tracks the cumulative ratings earned by each KnowPoster who answers. The service is currently free, and users earn the right to ask questions by answering them.

“The promise of true e-business is markedly closer to reality now that thousands of companies can finally unbind critical business information that will make them more effective competitors,” said Jim Demetriades, founder, chairman and CEO, STC. “Our customers have been clamoring for an integration solution between SAP and Siebel, and with escalating pressure on companies to become e-businesses, the industry-wide demand for it has never been greater.”

Significantly, STC’s SAP-Siebel Intelligent Bridge provides customers with more than 80 percent of the total integration between SAP R/3 and Siebel applications, right out-of-the-box. It effectively synchronizes accounts, account hierarchies, products, product hierarchies, product prices, product discounts, sales orders, and sales order status.

Data transfer between Siebel Front Office Applications and any other application is handled by the e*Gate system. The e*Gate system provides the message validation, translation, routing, and business logic. As a further layer of integration, e*Way adapters enable direct application connectivity. They have successfully passed Siebel Validation.

“STC’s e*Gate is a natural solution for connecting Siebel Front Office Applications to back office, data warehouse, and supply chain management applications,” said Michael Straub, Siebel Alliances technical director. “With STC’s specialized e*Way for Siebel and powerful end-user tools, Siebel Systems’ users can achieve speedy deployment.”

SAP AG has also certified STC’s e*Way EDI Adapter for R/3 and e*Way ALE Adapter for R/3. The e*Way Adapters for SAP enable the rapid integration of R/3 with other third party software packages.

Oracle Portal-to-Go is Internet software that enables virtually any wireless device to access any existing Web or database application or content, including secure e-business applications. By extending Internet access beyond today’s PC-based access points to the 305 million wireless handsets in use, Oracle Portal-to-Go opens the door to a rapidly expanding market that is three times larger than that of today’s Internet.

“Industry research has shown the wireless data services market to be growing at an exponential rate, particularly in Europe where the carriers are most advanced,” said Denise Lahey, vice president of Oracle’s Mobile and Embedded Products Division. “It makes perfect sense for Oracle to work with Cap Gemini because of the company’s extensive experience with mobile operators and telecom infrastructure in this burgeoning market. We expect this will drive the rapid adoption of Oracle Portal-to-Go in Europe and the U.S.”

Cap Gemini and Oracle intend to develop, market, sell and implement products and services and provide collaborative solutions to joint clients. Additionally, Oracle and Cap Gemini will leverage their respective geographic strengths in response to the global need to implement wireless Internet solutions quickly and effectively.

RosettaNet PIPs consist of system-to-system XML-based dialogs that define how business processes are conducted between IT manufacturers, software publishers, distributors, resellers, and end-users. Using its XML Connector, CrossWorlds will map to specific RosettaNet document type definitions within the PIPs.

CrossWorlds e-business Collaborations combined with the RosettaNet PIPs will enable IT supply chain partners to align their e-business processes so they can further leverage their investments in enterprise applications, including e-business sales and procurement applications over the Internet. Examples of the CrossWorlds e-business Collaborations include Customer Synchronization, Item Synchronization, Vendor Manager, and Purchase Order Processing.

“By adding XML support, we offer a new world of opportunities for enterprises to connect with their business partners over the Internet, leveraging the latest standards,” said Prashant Gupta, CTO, CrossWorlds Software. “CrossWorlds is pleased to be working with RosettaNet to provide a more rapid, standard solution for e-business integration. The high-tech industry was one of the first to understand the potential of collaborative business-to-business e-commerce, and CrossWorlds supports RosettaNet’s efforts to expand PIPs as a way to facilitate true business process-level integration and enable real-time trading networks.”

RosettaNet was formed to develop and deploy global open and common business interfaces, enabling small and large buyers and sellers of computer technology to do electronic business more efficiently. More than 60 companies representing $600 billion in annual revenues currently provide the mandate for RosettaNet’s standards development strategy.

“As Allaire customers move into high-end global 2000 projects, they are demanding the same robust feature set on Linux that they expect with any other Web application development platform,” said Jack Lull, vice president of development for Allaire. “Merant’s DataDirect technology was a natural fit for Allaire, providing exceptional performance, scalability, and a broad range of database support.”

ColdFusion has enabled more than 3,500 companies worldwide to create a variety of transaction-intensive Web solutions on intranets and public Internet sites, including e-commerce, content management, and business automation.

“As the market leader in data access and integration, Merant is proud to enable high-quality connectivity for Allaire’s ColdFusion application,” said Michael Consoli, Merant senior vice president and general manager of DataDirect. “By leveraging Merant DataDirect technology, Allaire customers can now link ColdFusion Web applications on Linux to a variety of enterprise data stores, with the scalability and distributed transaction support required in e-business solutions.”

Vendor: New Era of Networks (NEON)

ARP Datacon AG, a leading computer retailer in Switzerland, Germany and Austria, has implemented SAP Online Store. The deployment will enable ARP Datacon to sell and service products, and to make purchases via the Web.

NEON re-engineered ARP Datacon’s business processes and realigned them to meet requirements for performing e-business transactions. The comprehensive project entailed customizing, installing and configuring SAP’s Web-based Online Store, and integrating it with ARP Datacon’s internal systems, external trading partners and retail customers. NEON’s SAP consultants integrated all data from the Internet – orders, product availability, and payments – into the central SAP system, reducing administrative costs, data redundancy, and the probability of errors.

“The SAP R/3 project – and in particular NEON’s integration of the SAP Online Store – is very important for ARP Datacon. This solution enables our fast expansion into new markets by optimizing our business processes,” said Bernhard Stocker, marketing manager for ARP Datacon. “The special attention we have given to integrating our customers and suppliers with the new, Internet technology enables us to automate our business processes and provide better overall service.”

ABM AMRO IMPLEMENTS ONLINE BANKING PROJECT

Vendor: Level 8

Product: Geneva Integrator

ABN AMRO, a leading international banking group, has deployed Level 8’s Geneva Integrator product for new cash management and online banking integration projects. Level 8’s Geneva Integrator enabled ABN AMRO to integrate several of the company’s back-end legacy systems with Web-based applications in order to handle the growing number of customer online inquiries. In only four months, Geneva Integrator enabled ABN AMRO to utilize data from its legacy systems and convert it quickly to different Web formats such as XML and HTML.

As a member of Integrion, an international consortium of banks that has pooled its resources to provide a common infrastructure for online banking, ABN AMRO also used Geneva Integrator as a message broker between the consortium’s common infrastructure, known as the Integrion Financial Network, and ABN AMRO’s core processing systems.

“ABN AMRO selected Geneva for its integration projects because it provided an immensely flexible and scalable infrastructure that quickly taps any legacy system,” said Alan Singer, vice-president of IT at ABN AMRO. “As a result, we reduced integration and development costs and enhanced our competitive position by improving our products, services, and time to market.”

“The licensing of over 10 million CyberTrust digital certificates – more than double the number of digital certificates licensed or issued by our closest competitor – represents the success of our product and service offerings and secure extranet strategy,” said Peter J. Hussey, president of CyberTrust. “CyberTrust’s strategy draws from our unique mixture of products and services to assist customers in developing the infrastructure to manage digital certificates and create a secure environment to conduct high-value business-to-business transactions.”