IBM Corp is working with major ERP vendors to grab a larger slice of the middleware and messaging market for its MQSeries software. Yesterday, Baan Company NV announced that it was using IBM’s software as the message queuing software in its OpenWorld integration framework (CI No 3,788).
Rob Lamb, MQSeries business unit executive at IBM, confirmed that IBM was talking to major ERP vendors about using MQSeries in their integration software. Lamb said that IBM has MQSeries adapters – which convert application-specific data into the MQSeries format, and vice versa, for all of the major ERP suites, including SAP, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards. Analysts estimate that MQSeries middleware and messaging software accounts for two- thirds of the entire market.
Baan’s OpenWorld is intended to provide tighter integration between separate Baan applications – such as it supply chain management and ERP offerings – as well linking Baan software with other ERP suites and disparate offerings like web servers and customer billing applications. The aim is to better position Baan applications as part of an e-commerce system, able to communicate with web sites that a customer would see and trickle down changes through the enterprise.
