February 27, 2001 -- In a move that unites the young and aggressive with the old and established, i2 Technologies and Intel Corp. recently announced an e-business alliance designed to accelerate deployment of i2's e-marketplace and supply chain management applications powered by Intel-based servers. (There's no word as yet on whether Blue Man Group will soon be plugging i2.)
The agreement covers joint sales and marketing programs, i2 product roadmap alignment, on-site Intel engineering technical services and support, and how-to guides for fast and easy solution installation and optimization. The alliance includes the Intel Xeon and Intel Itanium processor families and spans all of i2's product lines, including its TradeMatrix suite of applications for large corporations and Pronto products for small- to medium-sized businesses. i2's B2B solution incorporates a complete supply chain model, marketplace-to-marketplace support and rich content management capabilities.
Intel is the pre-eminent building block supplier for the Internet, communications, computing and services in the digital age, said Darryll Dewan, i2 group vice president. The combination of i2's powerful TradeMatrix Solutions, coupled with Intel-based servers, empowers the end user to handle many operations while simultaneously managing the extended value chain. As companies come to rely more heavily on business processes done in real-time, the need for next-generation computing power will continue to grow. The i2-Intel alliance is a logical choice for a company's success.
i2 is a leader in the increasingly important e-marketplace and supply chain e-business areas, and establishing a structured alliance that spans development to deployment will help accelerate delivery of high-performing solutions at lower costs, said Deborah Conrad, vice president and general manager of Intel's Business Marketing and Alliance Group. We are experiencing strong momentum for our Xeon processor family and are readying the Itanium processor for production systems. Bringing the design and performance characteristics of Intel-based servers to i2's applications will better enable corporations to plan in real-time, resulting in lower inventory and increased throughput in factories.
i2's products are deployed in the mid-tier application, as well as back-end database servers within the e-business data center computing infrastructure. Intel will house its own engineers onsite with i2 staff to further develop and optimize i2's family of products on Intel Architecture. The solutions will focus on the Windows operating system initially, but will also include Unix operating systems in the future.
