After attending a webcast last week hosted by Sterling Commerce that featured Forrester Research’s Principal Analyst, Ken Vollmer, I thought it would be of great value to our customer base to present a brief recap of the webcast. The webcast focused on the business strategy that IBM and Sterling Commerce have developed surrounding their business-to-business (B2B / B2Bi) integration solutions now that IBM has completed the acquisition of Sterling Commerce. In short, Sterling Integrator (SI) will become the core foundation of key IBM B2B / B2Bi solutions and IBM will integrate several of its key integration tools with SI to become a more robust B2B solution.
Also addressed was the immediate future plans for some of Sterling Commerce and IBM’s core EDI and B2B / B2Bi software solutions. All of the products listed below are going to be supported in some fashion and either in an ongoing capacity of for a specified period of time. Some of the timelines for support are still being finalized. Those addressed were as follows:
B2B Solutions:
- Sterling Integrator
- WebSphere Partner Gateway
- WebSphere Transformation Extender Trading Manager
- Sterling Gentran Server
- WebSphere Transformation Extender
- Network Solution:
- Sterling Collaboration Network
- Sterling File Gateway
- WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition
- Sterling Connect:Direct
If you would like more information relative to the webcast and the particular information covered about IBM and Sterling Commerce's strategy for its B2B integration solutions, please feel free to contact me at shulme@remedi.com. Special thanks to Ken Vollmer at Forrester Research for the research paper, The IBM B2B Integration Solutions Strategy, that he wrote to consolidate the webcast from which much of this blog information was obtained.
