Enterprise infrastructure and integration company Sybase SA has entered into an agreement with Diogenes, a US developer of solutions for business transaction networks, to represent the company's flagship product iMercury in SA and throughout the African continent. The product will be launched in Cape Town on 27 February.
iMercury provides infrastructure for the creation and scaling of transaction-oriented business communities, enabling cost-effective messaging beyond the firewall and making business networks a reality for trading partners of all sizes.
Alan Cowley, Sybase SA CEO, says iMercury is an entirely new concept in the world of business transaction networks. "Until the appearance of iMercury, business network infrastructure has typically been too costly to buy, deploy and maintain for any but the very largest companies," he says. "With iMercury EDI-class e-commerce becomes affordable and practical for business communities comprising all types of companies and trading partners."
While the adoption of EDI has been slow in SA, there is now a greater demand for connectivity between business partners. Not only is EDI very expensive, but also it lacks standards flexibility and repeatability, and often leads to trading communities that are monopolistic by nature and do not allow for freedom of choice. iMercury offers all the benefits of a business network, without these drawbacks.
"Sybase SA has been involved in enterprise software infrastructure in this country for the past 12 years and our experiences have made it clear to us that there is a need in the market for integration that extends beyond the corporate firewall. We investigated extensively and we believe that Diogenes has developed a product that stands apart in terms of guaranteed transactional messaging and security."
Business networks have traditionally been costly, making it difficult for trading partners to take advantage of their many benefits they have to offer, including immediacy, and reductions on transaction fees and time. They also facilitate personal interaction and intimacy between trading partners, and remove manual intervention in the e-commerce cycle.
With the significant investment the South African market has made in the IBM MQSeries product line, Cowley says iMercury will be invaluable in enabling companies to extend and expand their MQSeries solutions.
"iMercury is complementary to MQ and integrates elegantly with the product, enabling users to grow their MQ transaction communities," Cowley says. "Whatever transactions take place inside the firewall through MQ can now be extended beyond it via iMercury."
Customers, suppliers and partners need to be connected if they are to have access to critical information such as stock availability. "E-business cannot become a reality between partners that do not have formal IT relationships because their systems do not have intimacy and are typically disparate," says Cowley. While major players may trade through EDI, this can only be achieved through a high degree of focus between their IT departments.
"iMercury makes the creation of business networks a practical reality by opening up trading facilities between all customers, suppliers and partners, automating connectivity, offering sophisticated security, and incorporating specialised management tools.
Some of the features offered by Java-based iMercury include:
* Guaranteed transactional messaging - guaranteed once and once only transaction delivery eliminates the risk of unreliability that has hampered e-commerce. Message queuing ensures that transmission is resumed automatically in the case of application failures, server downtime and network outages.
* Unrivalled throughput - iMercury routinely achieves throughput rates measured in the thousands per second on standard hardware. Its multi-threaded architecture makes it easily scalable.
* Security - A secure pipe, complete with RSA encryption, non-repudiation and firewall tunnelling, protects the connections between partners.
* Automated deployment and maintenance - iMercury can be deployed within seconds to any business partners. Installation and configuration is hands-free for clients, so no training is required.
Sybase will be targeting the healthcare, retail and automotive industries, but plans to develop the market for iMercury via all organisations that engage in business-to-business transactions.
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