Irvine, CA — March 20, 2003 — Process integration specialist Viacore this week touted the scalability of its tools for building private trading communities, reporting that it has managed more than 100 million real-time, inter-business processes on behalf of its clients and that it currently manages more than 600 application-to-application process channels that link more than 100 Global 2000 companies across five continents.
Viacore argued that the complex nature of integrating and scaling a private trading community requires a solution that ensures the capability of the community builder, the readiness of the community participant and the stability of the connection between them.
"End-to-end process integration is more involved than just sending and receiving a document," said Fadi Chehad}, chairman and CEO of Viacore. "True process integration is like a vibrant dance between systems. There's a choreography to it that includes rhythm, timing and making sure you aren't stepping on your partners' toes. In order to manage real-time process integration on a massive scale, you need to know more than just the steps — you have to make sure that not a single community participant misses a beat. And this comes with experience."
Chehad}'s company offers a solution, called BusinessTone, that Viacore said provides real-time, enterprise-to-enterprise application integration for such trading community builders as Arrow Electronics, Cisco Systems, HP and NEC, as well as hundreds of their trading partners. BusinessTone supports these private communities with turnkey services that connect and manage the interoperability between trading partners across an extended enterprise.
"Viacore's core focus is the business of managing the end-to-end processes of a private community," said Paul Katz, vice president of digital supply chain solutions at Arrow.
Katz said that BusinessTone methodologies are playing a key role in enabling and operating Arrow Connects!, which he described as the electronics distribution industry's first large-scale, machine-to-machine, real-time communication network. "The real-time information shared via Arrow's integrated community provides a new level of visibility and responsiveness in several of our key business processes, resulting in short- and long-term improvements in Arrow's supply chain efficiency and control," Katz said.
Viacore offers BusinessTone to community builders as a usage-based utility service intended to lower the amount of risk, capital expenditure and time required to build and operate private, branded inter-business communities. BusinessTone supports multiple protocols and standards, including EDI, cXML, xCBL, SOAP and RosettaNet PIPs.
