Intentia, IBM Ally to Target Mid-market

Swedish solution provider standardizes on Big Blue's platform, moves to Linux foundation

Swedish solution provider standardizes on Big Blue's platform, moves to Linux foundation

White Plains, NY — October 28, 2003 — Solution providers IBM and Intentia International today announced an expansion of their alliance designed to help customers integrate their business processes for enterprise and supply chain management through a consolidated software offering.

As part of the alliance, Intentia will standardize and ship its J2EE-based Movex Collaboration applications on IBM's middleware and hardware running on Linux. The companies will also expand their joint sales, marketing and development activities, they said in a statement.

Stockholm, Sweden-based Intentia boasts some 3,500 customers in 40 countries for its enterprise and supply chain applications, and it is the second-largest provider of these solutions specializing in the mid-market.

The company said that, in allying with Big Blue, it is seeking to bolster its mid-market and enterprise market share by providing the Movex application suite with an open, scalable foundation through standardization on the IBM infrastructure. Intentia's J2EE-based Movex applications running on IBM infrastructure software can enable customers to develop and implement collaborative enterprise solutions across different computing platforms at a lower cost, Intentia asserts.

"The ability to collaborate, anticipate opportunities and respond quickly to changes transparently throughout the supply chain is an important element of an on demand environment," said Bjorn Algkvist, president and CEO of Intentia International. "Customers can have the flexibility to integrate solutions both within and across the enterprise with their suppliers, partners, customers and other members of the extended value chain."

Intentia will pre-integrate its Movex applications with IBM's WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Portal-Express and DB2 Universal Database. As such, every order from a medium-sized business will be shipped with IBM's technology embedded inside the Intentia application suite, according to the two companies.

Intentia also will develop an optimized version of Movex for Linux, a platform that the provider says is gaining momentum in the mid-market. The Movex Collaboration Application groups include: Enterprise Management, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Business Performance Measurement, Value Chain Collaboration and e-business.

For IBM, the alliance is part of that company's strategy for supporting mid-market customers, according to Marc Lautenbach, general manager for global small and medium business at IBM. "Together, IBM and Intentia can deliver the benefits of best-in-class application functionality on a secure, solid foundation in a convenient, user-friendly package to customers," Lautenbach said in a statement.

Under the terms of the agreement, IBM and Intentia will jointly market and sell the solution to target segments and customers worldwide. IBM's sales force will market the combined offering, and IBM will have dedicated consultants in Intentia's IBM Competency Centre to support application development and testing, and optimization, tuning and other development activities. Intentia will work with IBM Global Services in marketing and sales activities in selected cases.

Intentia will promote IBM's eServer iSeries, xSeries and pSeries hardware and middleware as their technologies of choice and optimal reference platforms in marketing and sales activities.

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