SDCExec.com |

Columbus, Ohio — September 30, 2008 — Sterling Commerce, an AT&T Inc company, yesterday announced a new alliance strategy that it said is designed to help companies make advancements in global commerce by collaborating both inside and outside their enterprise.

As part of that strategy, the company said it has extended its relationships with multiple systems integrators to have the SIs incorporate Sterling Commerce solutions in their portfolio offerings. Additionally, Sterling Commerce said it will use those firms' systems integration and consulting services to enable customers to address vertical industry challenges.

"In today's global commerce environment, no company is successful alone," commented Joel Reed, senior vice president, Corporate Marketing and Strategic Alliances, at Sterling Commerce. "With our alliance strategy, we're delivering a solutions and services combination that will enable companies to work within their business communities in a productive, secure and effective manner that drives positive business results for all involved."

Reed added that the focus of the alliance is on the processes that are typically conducted outside the four walls of an enterprise, including business-to-business transactions, inbound supply, fulfillment and payment, among others. Sterling Commerce said it hopes that by partnering with these systems integrators it can bring more visibility and more business processes improvement to its customers.

The strategy is expected to benefit customers by providing a streamlined relationship between Sterling Commerce and its alliance partners to deliver more relevant and complete solutions that address key vertical industry challenges and an enhanced capacity to serve and execute globally to meet the demands of global, multi-national companies.

According to Gartner Group: "Business trends, such as outsourcing, globalization, SaaS and IT trends (such as application modernization, [service-oriented architecture (SOA)] and the proliferation of B2B) standards — such as AS2, RosettaNet, Web services, SWIFT and so on), are driving companies to more frequently link and share internal business processes and application data with external business partners." ("Key Issues for Multienterprise B2B Integration, 2008" by Benoit J. Lheureux, Paolo Malinverno, L. Frank Kenney).

Sterling Commerce, which provides solutions that enable integration of business processes and applications, said it is embedding these solutions in each system integrators' solution framework to drive added value for customers in their inquiry-to-cash, multi-channel commerce, supply chain management and enterprise payments processes. The company also is using its alliance partners' industry knowledge and systems integration and consulting services with Sterling Commerce solutions for enterprise integration, multi-enterprise integration, payments management, and multi-channel selling and fulfillment to enable companies to achieve higher levels of performance by optimizing their business communities, processes and technologies.