Openings with customers

E2open is bow offering its B2B Integration Solution, a complete, fully managed solution that drastically reduces the cost and complexity for companies of all sizes and IT capabilities to rapidly integrate with customers and channel partners. The solution is claimed to flexibly scale from a handful of connections to a solution capable of reliably supporting hundreds of B2B integrations. The solution’s next-generation directory-based architecture combined with its on demand licensing and delivery model reduces the complexity of B2B integration while delivering total cost of ownership (TCO) savings of up to 75 per cent.

In separate announcements, IBM and ExceLight detailed their use of the E2open B2B Integration Solution to integrate with customers, demonstrating the solution’s ability to deliver value to companies of all sizes, IT capabilities and legacy B2B infrastructures. Other previously announced customers currently in production include LG Electronics, Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic),Seagate Technology and Wistron.

Many midsize organisations will soon be automating their own B2B operations,leading to a proliferation of Web-services-based trading hubs. The cost and IT expertise of implementing these will be a burden for many midsize enterprises. Managing a Web services network overall still requires a lot of sophisticated IT skills, including communications, security, industry standards and B2B application integration software. Traditional B2Bi solutions have failed to meet the need for low cost, low complexity B2B integration required for mass adoption– they are either too expensive for smaller organisations or lack the ability to cost-effectively scale beyond a few integrations for larger enterprises. This is where E2open claims a significant advantage.

The E2open B2B Integration Solution is a directory-based, on demand approach to inter-company process integration and includes all of the necessary software,hardware, hosting, operations, services and support – backed by a global,performance-based service level agreement – needed to establish and manage customer and channel partner integrations. The solution enables organisations to rapidly integrate with customers and partners regardless of their preferred communication protocols, data formats or business process rules. It changes the economics of integration by solving many of the shortcomings of traditional approaches such as point-to-point solutions using B2Bi software and value-added network (VAN) solutions.

For more, see www.e2open.com