St. Charles, IL February 4, 2003 Vista Software Solutions, a provider of applications to the consumer goods industry, this week debuted a suite of collaborative commerce solutions based on Microsoft's .NET technology.
Vista said that its C-Commerce product suite, in addition to being built on the foundation of Microsoft's .NET technology, supports standards of international commerce based on the work of UCCnet and the global standards management process (GSMP).
The C-Commerce product suite includes VistaRetail for retailers, VistaSupply for manufacturers, the VistaCPG 7i Internet-based trade funds management solution and VistaPortal, an executive dashboard that runs on the Web. All the applications support UCCnet and are ready to enact future standards of GSMP, according to Vista.
UCCnet, a not-for-profit organization that provides item registry and data synchronization based on industry-developed standards, operates an alliance partner program that certifies solution providers such as Vista to offer UCCnet standard-compliant applications and services that enable the UCCnet community to work collaboratively.
"You need a complete solution involving connectivity, translation, staging database, workflow management and support for extended data," said Fred Geiger, senior vice president of product management at UCCnet. "Vista provides a complete solution for both supply- and demand-side trading partners."
The Vista product suite, compatible with generally available Microsoft server technology, is also in the process of being tested with Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 as a participant in Microsoft's beta program. The product suite is due to be fully certified and ready for deployment prior to the general release of Windows Server 2003 this spring.
"Vista has built solutions that fully leverage Microsoft .NET to enable Internet collaboration," said Don Richardson, director of the manufacturing industry solutions group at Microsoft.
Milan Vacval, Vista's vice president of product strategy, said the solution provider was focused on ensuring that its customers have the widest breadth of functionality that is compatible with industry standards, with emphasis on collaboration. "With the release of Vista's Collaborative Commerce solutions, retailers and suppliers can rapidly and easily adopt these standards," Vacval asserted.
Vacval noted that Vista had introduced a hosted-application option to make it easier for small and medium manufacturers to adopt UCCnet standards as soon as their items are loaded, without any hardware investment.
Bruce Stahl, Vista's vice president of technology, said that by adopting the .NET development tools, Vista was able to complete its new product suite more quickly than was possible in the past. "It has also allowed us to build a more flexible and architecturally scalable set of applications," Stahl added. "Previously we struggled to find a way to provide the robust functionality of our client/server applications with the easier deployment of a Web-based application. Microsoft .NET has resolved this for us, and we couldn't be more pleased with the results."
VistaRetail is currently available and in production at several retailers. VistaSupply will be generally available February 2003.
