News

IBM adds Viacore tools to WebSphere

• By Lana Gates
• August 12, 2003

IBM has signed an agreement to resell Viacore's BusinessTone community integration services as part of WebSphere Business Integration Connect 4.2. IBM officials said the move is part of an effort to move away from point-to-point B2B integration and toward machine-to-machine B2B integration.

The Viacore package is designed to aid companies in addressing integration requirements with B2B transactions and trading community integration, officials said.

Viacore, Irvine, Calif., decided late last year to extend its market reach by working with IBM, said Fadi Chehade, Viacore's chairman and CEO. "IBM is very, very focused on the integration market," he explained, adding that IBM is focused on educating the market, and is a leader in changing the computing model to a utility model.

Before this combined offering was available, customers could either choose to buy B2B software and integrate it themselves, or they could purchase the software and then invest in a service to help them build it, Chehade contended. He said the first option forced the use of software that is poorly designed around B2B point-to-point integration and was therefore insufficient to support multiparty, multiprocess integration. The second option proved to have a high cost because it was done on an hourly basis.

This combined offering is targeted at companies wishing to build a community to solve a particular business problem, Chehade noted, and usually involves integration of an ERP system, a community manager and participants.

"It's an ongoing process," he acknowledged. "Companies have new partners, new processes, new change management. It's a completely ongoing activity. We are agnostics to process, agnostics to sectors, agnostics to the industry and agnostics to the application."

IBM will offer the BusinessTone pre-packaged services using its on-demand delivery model, officials said.