New WebSphere Business Integration Software Enables Customers to Integrate Business Processes Across the Enterprise

SOMERS, NY - 04 Mar 2003: IBM today announced significant advancements to its WebSphere Business Integration portfolio providing businesses with a broad set of functions necessary to integrate, manage and monitor business processes across an enterprise and with trading partners.

IBM's new WebSphere Business Integration software combines functions enabling customers to model and simulate how business processes will flow across a value chain; to integrate those processes across the "silos" of custom and packaged applications typically found in many businesses today; to connect these processes with suppliers and customers; to monitor the business processes, and to manage the performance of the business.

This type of end-to-end -- or "horizontal" -- integration helps companies respond faster to customer needs; adapt faster to changes in supply and demand; and more flexibly handle the variety of on-the-fly changes typical in business today. By helping businesses with these issues, WebSphere Business Integration software is central to helping customers become on-demand e-businesses.

The Capabilities of WebSphere Business Integration
WebSphere Business Integration now delivers key capabilities that customers have recognized as critical components to achieve effective integration across an IT infrastructure. These five capabilities -- model, integrate, connect, monitor, and manage -- are necessary to help customers turn business innovation into business results:

• Model and simulate business processes: Business professionals can participate in innovative business process design and help model current and plan future processes

• Integrate people, processes, and applications: Leverage new best of breed applications and legacy systems through real-time business process integration

• Connect customers and business partners: Accelerate e-business initiatives and deliver business agility to react quickly to market changes in value chains

• Monitor business processes end-to-end: Observe and track the state of business process events and take corrective action to improve business execution without affecting IT infrastructure

• Manage business effectiveness and improve overall business performance: Analyze and improve business process operations

"We purchased IBM's WebSphere Business Integration solution as a key enabler for our enterprise-wide transformation initiative to become more guest centric. This solution will help us better integrate our packaged applications, monitor our business processes, and manage the performance of our business. These capabilities will position us to respond more dynamically to customer demands and with more resiliency when business process changes are required, making us an 'on demand' enterprise."
- Nick Pietrocarlo, program manager, Royal Caribbean Cruises, Ltd.

The End-to-End Industry Focus
These capabilities can deliver business value such as faster time to market and greater return on investment to IBM's customers in the automotive, electronics, financial services, healthcare, and retail distribution industries. Customers such as Bombardier, Inc., Credit Lyonnais, Food Lion LLC, Quantum Corporation, Sara Lee Corporation, and Siemens ICN purchased WebSphere Business Integration to provide more accurate information to customers and partners, more effectively manage their supply chain, automate and optimize purchasing transactions, and improve customer service.

"To help our customers manage business processes, realize application integration and rapidly improve operational efficiencies, Galaxia leveraged the WebSphere Business Integration platform to develop our Enterprise Product Change Management (ePCM) solution suite. Our customers are realizing a positive return on investment and a faster PCM process because they are reducing cycle times, implementing paperless processes and streamlining and integrating with legacy systems."
- Abdellah Hoummady, Ph.D., President, Galaxia

"In today's competitive environment, organizations are focused on flexibility and efficiency. Businesses must have a powerful business integration system to adapt quickly to economic changes and respond to customers dynamically with increasing speed," said Paraic Sweeney, vice president of marketing, WebSphere Business Integration, IBM. "With the most complete range of business integration capabilities and leadership support for open standards and Web services, WebSphere Business Integration helps companies achieve these goals and is the basis for transforming e-business organizations to on-demand enterprises."

What's New In WebSphere Business Integration

* IBM WebSphere Business Integration Modeler
Customers use IBM WebSphere Business Integration Modeler to model, identify, analyze and simulate business processes. It is part of the WebSphere Business Integration portfolio and helps business professionals design and develop new and innovative ways to run the business.

*IBM WebSphere Business Integration Server 4.2
IBM customers can use WebSphere Business Integration Server 4.2, an enterprise-wide integration infrastructure, to integrate quickly new or existing applications or systems on diverse platforms, create and rapidly deploy new business processes, or solve a variety of business integration needs. The new product release simplifies the integration process and provides a wide range of integration capabilities.

New WebSphere Business Integration Server 4.2 features and benefits include:

• Improved tooling: reduces implementation time by eliminating the need for custom Java integration programming;

• Support for Eclipse open source platform: Through Eclipse technology, the development platform invented by IBM and its partners and contributed to the open-source community, developers can use WebSphere Business Integration tools along with software from other vendors in a fully integrated, portal-like environment that cuts development time by half; increases openness of tooling environment and improves ease of use; offers a more consistent user interface across the entire platform

• Extended Web services functionality: Gives users the ability to consume or publish business processes as Web services;

• Enhanced workforce management support: Open standard (LDAP) interface allows administration of staff roles and permissions in 3rd party directory service products and where delays in response are likely to occur, process activities can now be configured to timeout and later resume where they left off, and

• Improved process viewing: Browser-based monitors can be customized to deliver role-based dashboards, enabling users to view how business processes are performing

*IBM WebSphere Business Integration Monitor
IBM WebSphere Business Integration Monitor is used to monitor and improve business processes in real-time. It is part of the WebSphere Business Integration portfolio and provides Line of Business professionals with customizable dashboard views, giving insight for both operational and business performance. With an advanced alerting system, customers can now utilize real-time metrics to help further optimize business operations.

IBM WebSphere Business Integration Modeler, IBM WebSphere Business Integration Server 4.2, and IBM WebSphere Business Integration Monitor will be available later this month.

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