Tibco Software Inc has agreed to resell TSI International Software Ltd’s Mercator software. As part of the agreement, TSI has agreed to integrate Tibco’s Rendezvous messaging middleware with Mercator. Like Rendezvous, Mercator is middleware, but of a specialized kind. It takes a given representation of information and transforms it to another representation. For example, the way a customer is represented in Peoplesoft is different from the way the same customer is represented in SAP. You can customize transformation for each application, or you can centralize it, explains Tibco’s vice president of sales, Murat Sonmez, Mercator lets customers centralize it. The software has built-in transformation definitions for SAP R/3 and EDI, and TSI developers are working on support for the financial software SWIFT. It’s the one-stop shopping approach to middleware, Sonmez says. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, although Sonmez says the deal is a typical OEM alliance. Tibco approved of TSI’s track record and felt that the companies had a good cultural fit. Now the challenge is to move Mercator into Tibco’s existing market for Rendezvous. Three hundred or so investment banks, parts of the semiconductor industry, Ericsson and Compaq are among the 600 companies now using Rendezvous to develop enterprise applications. Sonmez says: All are prospects for Mercator.
