Sterling Commerce Launches Visibility Manager
Visibility Manager is First Application to Combine Sterling and Yantra Technology
ORLANDO, Fla.--Oct. 18, 2005--Sterling Commerce, the multi-enterprise collaboration company, announced today Visibility Manager as its first supply chain application available within its newly architected business process network, the Sterling Collaboration Network. Visibility Manager gives Sterling’s network customers unprecedented access to supply chain information critical to meeting customer demands and other important operational requirements, resulting in new cost savings, process improvements and a competitive advantage for their business.
Visibility Manager represents the further blending of Sterling’s business integration technology with supply chain management technology from Yantra Corporation which Sterling acquired in February 2005.
Built on Sterling’s Multi-Enterprise Services Architecture (MESA), the Sterling Collaboration Network can host both integration services as well as applications, e.g., order management, supply chain execution, store operations and many others. Unlike major competitors, there is no migration necessary for Sterling customers to take advantage of this unified architecture, making the delivery of new capabilities seamless.
“This announcement represents our commitment to the network market as well as a significant step in Sterling’s vision to build upon our EDI heritage in offering greater value to customers in the form of hosted supply chain and other multi-enterprise applications,” said Sam Starr, CEO of Sterling Commerce. “Visibility Manager is a foundational step in advancing this vision that sets Sterling Commerce even further ahead of the pack in delivering innovative technology via multiple consumption models.”
According to Gartner Research Director, Benoit Lheureux, “The result of the emerging hybrid of integration and application services is a form of business process fusion that can be applied to the B2B context. Collectively, integration and application service providers are converging their capabilities to form a new market segment — ‘business process networks’ — that offers domain- or industry-specific B2B process integration services."[1]
Visibility manager is the latest network innovation from Sterling Commerce, which earlier this year introduced hosted data synchronization and managed AS2.
Visibility Manager
Visibility Manager provides document and process visibility into business transactions as they are traded among partners of all sizes. It offers a view into supply chain activity with a single interface that lets customers control all steps in a business process, such as order management, as a single, ongoing business transaction. With this control, organizations are able to be more responsive and profitable in their collaboration with all its business partners. For example, companies can:
• Use business rules modeler to set up actions to identify and fix problems as they occur.
• Activate automatic, exception-based alerts to keep key people in the business informed.
• Analyze reports that track key business performance indicators.
• Enable business users to easily locate the information they need to serve and manage key trading partner relationships.
Visibility Manager captures information from all relevant document types and media as they are generated. Customers can then specify the exact reporting structure and format they want from a single screen. The onscreen buttons make it easy to monitor any phase of any transaction with any partner. Visibility Manager will also summarize errors or problems in a set of transactions and can provide access to source documents. The end result is increased visibility of problem areas before they become business problems.
[1] Integration as a Service: Evolving VANs Focus on Processes, April 1, 2004. Benoit Lheureux, Gartner.
Contact:
• At Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, Julie Redard, Sterling Commerce, (781) 439-1861
• At Sterling Commerce, Emily Hall, (614) 790-8607
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