Columbus, OH April 2, 2002 Sterling Commerce has offered up a new strategy for e-enabling enterprises, providing packaged solutions that allow for modular implementation over time.
The company, a subsidiary of SBC Communications, has packaged its products and services under the combined market offerings of electronic trading network services and business integration solutions.
These combined offerings allow for modular implementation, giving businesses the flexibility to deploy capabilities as they are needed, the solution provider said in announcing the new strategy.
"This strategy is all about increasing business value for our customers and delivering solutions that extend and add capabilities to existing infrastructure, versus replacing it," said Terry Baker, chief marketing officer for Sterling Commerce. "These added capabilities can be implemented as needed and will further extend the reach and level of automation of B2B processes while customers build toward establishing an integrated, extended enterprise."
For electronic trading network services, the provider is offering its STERLING Information Broker as its core hosted B2B integration solution. This solution provides "any-to-any" data transformation services, supporting legacy communication protocols as well as emerging Internet communication transports, including EDI-INT, according to Sterling Commerce.
Additional service capabilities for the Information Broker include bridging services that allow customers to expand their reach to business partners participating in other value-added network (VAN) and e-marketplace communities, small- and mid-sized business partner enablement services and business community development services designed to quickly enable a customer's trading partners. A gateway service providing electronic payment and supplier remittance advice is due out in the second quarter.
For business integration, Sterling Commerce provides a modular suite of solutions to enable the integration of business processes within an enterprise and between trading communities. This suite offers enterprise integration framework capabilities, including data transformation, workflow and rules, B2B communications, Web integration, enterprise application integration and control and management. The framework brings together an enterprise's legacy infrastructure, enterprise applications and B2B commerce environments.
This framework runs on the provider's STERLING Integrator platform, designed to coordinate, automate and manage business processes through the integration of internal applications and external business partners. STERLING Integrator currently is available in North America and Latin America, with worldwide availability planned later in the year.
