IBM Announces Software Portfolio to Help Companies Achieve Business Integration
SOMERS, N.Y (May 05, 1998) – To help companies manage and integrate information across disparate systems, IBM today announced a family of software products that addresses Business Integration issues quickly and economically. Based on IBM’s industry-leading MQSeries* messaging software, IBM’s new software portfolio will make companies more agile, customer-oriented and competitive.
“With the rapid growth of business on the Internet, the wave of mergers and acquisitions, and industry deregulation, companies can no longer afford isolated IT systems that can’t talk to each other,” said Steve Mills, general manager, Software Solutions, IBM. “IBM’s Business Integration initiative builds on the success of IBM’s award-winning MQSeries middleware, our global capabilities and strong partner relationships to address these significant IT challenges more effectively and on a much broader scale.”
IBM’s Business Integration with MQSeries addresses critical areas of IT management: messaging, application and information integration, business process automation, support and service. These offerings — combined for the first time into one, complete solution — allow companies to maximize e-business opportunities by leveraging existing resources to improve speed-to-market and anticipate IT changes as their business changes.
Companies will benefit as they connect to intranets and Internets, tighten supply chains to optimize business processes, build value chains to reach new customers, solve technical issues like Year 2000 compliance, and automate business processes to improve service and efficiency. Companies should also achieve lower total cost of ownership by reducing skill requirements for integration tasks.
“Multistep business processes, such as account activation, require the smooth integration of data between systems, which can take minutes, hours or even days at a significant cost to companies,” said Nick Gall, senior research analyst, META Group. “Companies want comprehensive capabilities that address these Business Integration issues versus building their own solutions. Companies that offer these capabilities will take a leadership position in this emerging market.”
Industry Challenge: Business Integration
Business Integration is a vital concern for companies, which spend an estimated 40-60 percent of IT development and maintenance on integration and communications. According to a report by Spikes Cavell & Co. (October 1997), business managers are worried that a lack of integration between their information systems may be hampering their organizations’ ability to compete. To remain competitive, an organization must reliably integrate its business processes, systems and applications — “islands of information” — with customers, new partners, suppliers and service providers across geographies, while maintaining tight security and control over its own operation.
MQSeries, the most widely used message-queuing software on the market and the foundation for IBM’s Business Integration initiative, integrates existing, new and packaged applications, such as Enterprise Resource Planning, across a wide variety of platforms, from mainframes to PCs. MQSeries runs on 25 platforms, more than any other messaging software on the market.
Source: IBM