By Nick Patience
Sterling Commerce Inc kicked off an annual worldwide conference yesterday with a set of strategic initiatives, some of which have more substance than the others. The Dallas, Texas-based firm, which is holding its conference in Chicago this week, has announced new versions of some of its products and gathered its various business strands into five overall areas. They are extranet management services, community management, business process integration, e-commerce infrastructure and outsourcing. The company is still maintaining its four product areas, Commerce, Connect, Gentran and Vector, which straddle these strategic initiatives.
Overall the move can be seen as an effort to increase the company’s revenues from internet-related software and services, which stood at 33% of the total in its fiscal second quarter, which ended March 31. When those results were announced last week the company made great pains to point out that that figure is on the rise – it was 27% in the same period the previous year.
Probably the most interesting of these initiatives is business process integration (BPI). Sterling is introducing XML translation capabilities to its Gentran set of tools for translation between EDI and other frameworks that enables business to share information with their suppliers, partners and customers. The company says there is a need to translate between EDI and XML and back-end systems like SAP and PeopleSoft. Sterling will also announce a partnership with Oberon Software Inc to license its Prospero set of application components that will add adapters to Gentran. Sterling describes the resulting tool as an e-commerce broker that provides links to ERP, messaging and other systems.
Sterling will also announce four products in its Gentran Web Suite range for integration of documents and other information at levels ranging from infrequently to real-time. WebForms is meant for exchanging the occasional document – this is the standalone version, rather than the outsourcing version the company has previously announced; Web Data Exchange is meant for a few thousand exchanges of data each month; Internet Data Exchange supports additional protocols, including PGP, S/Mime, EDI-INT and so on, while the real-time integration is based on WebMethods Inc’s tools for integrating back-end systems into supplier’s and partner’s own web site. The e-commerce broker is available around September while web Suite will be out June 30, as will Gentran supporting XML translation.
On the extranet management services front, Sterling hasn’t announced anything new just yet; just the strategic initiative, but the outsourcing part of the business, already operational in the US will extend its reach worldwide with an announcement of partners within a few weeks. The community management initiative does include some new stuff, including the licensing of Cyclone Software’s EDI interoperability tools and Sterling has opened up its Connect Direct and Connect Mailbox data exchange and repository tools by adding support for secure FTP with SSL and PKI support. á
