Palo Alto, CA March 15, 2002 B2B integration specialist TIBCO Software this week announced a program to offer vertical solutions tailored to specific industries in an effort to bring integration closer to its customers' business and information technology (IT) needs.
TIBCO said that under its Industry Solutions Program, it has worked with business partners and customers to develop vertical solutions that incorporate TIBCO's own integration products along with industry-specific business processes that leverage best practices gained from customers' experience.
In customizing its solutions for specific industries, TIBCO argued that it can offer faster implementations, easier management and more rapid return on investment (ROI) on its solutions.
"We have created the TIBCO Industry Solutions program in order to reach a broader marketplace with integration solutions [that] are easier to use, deploy and manage and provide a faster ROI," said Murat Sonmez, senior vice president of marketing for TIBCO Software.
The first solutions available under the program will be for the manufacturing, oil and gas, utilities and financial services industries.
The manufacturing offering, provided through TIBCO partner Sierra Atlantic, is an integration solution for product chain management (PCM). The solution, called PCMNet, integrates PCM solutions with enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other enterprise systems, which TIBCO said will allow companies in the manufacturing sector to collaboratively build products more effectively and cost efficiently.
For the oil and gas industry, TIBCO partner ZettaWorks is offering Operations Advantage for Oil & Gas, which provides for integration of disparate systems to facilitate the delivery of real-time, user-defined data and reports used for analysis of wells, fields and oil and gas portfolios. TIBCO said these tools, delivered through individualized portals, enable enterprise decision support, what-if scenario modeling, alert mechanisms for well and field events and data visualization based on dynamic decision flows.
TIBCO's solution for the utility industry, Real-time Customer Service for Utilities, provides a framework for out-of-the-box integration between Siebel eEnergy and customer information systems, which the provider says gives customer service representatives in a call center a consistent and comprehensive view of customer information.
The solution for the financial services industry provides business process management (BPM) for processing cross-border trades, connecting to back-end systems and delivering management capabilities that keep track of timeouts, number of trades outstanding and service quality.
Jon Derome, program manager at consultancy Yankee Group, said that TIBCO's latest move signals an evolution in the integration market: "As evidenced by TIBCO's Industry Solutions program, the integration software market is maturing and tools are developing into solutions."
Derome added that through the solutions, TIBCO and its partners are moving to translate their industry expertise into reusable integration templates. "These templates should reduce implementation cost and complexity, making integration software accessible to a more diverse group of users," he concluded.
