December 6, 1999

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ERP Vendors Move Into The Integration Market
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PlasticsNet.Com chose J.D. Edwards as an ERP partner not because the vendor offers superior integration tools, but because of its willingness to work closely with the company to develop interfaces to other systems, such as a proprietary online procurement front end and a messaging hub that exchanges data with suppliers. "Integration is one of three or four technology pillars of our organization, says Justin Dye, director of operations at PlasticsNet.Com.

Being integration-friendly can work to the advantage of ERP vendors in other ways: It can help them sell non-ERP software, such as their own customer-relationship management and supply-chain management applications, to competitors' customers. "This helps us market Oracle CRM to users of SAP ERP. It's a crucial piece of glue we need to be successful," says Jeremy Burton, VP of server marketing at Oracle. That, in turn, gives users more choice when it comes to deciding what software to use and when to use it.

Experts say these developments indicate a trend among ERP vendors toward message-oriented integration, rather than what they've been offering--a collection of proprietary application programming interfaces. Oracle's integration tools, for example, employ messaging technology based on XML and MQSeries to transform, route, and broadcast data to multiple applications on a publish-subscribe basis.

The approach allows for a rapid exchange of information among many applications, which will only grow more important as companies add E-business, front-office, and supply-chain management applications to ERP deployments, and as their forays into online commerce require them to respond to requests with lightening speed, says Ross Altman, an analyst at Gartner Group. Meta Group's Scholler says most of the major application vendors will supply technology that enables messaging communication in the next year.

But some companies aren't waiting. 3Com Corp., the Santa Clara, Calif., networking company, selected integration tools from Tibco to clamp together myriad systems it inherited from its acquisition of US Robotics in 1997, including Informix, SAP, and Siebel Systems applications deployed at 3Com and US Robotics' installations of Clarify, Oracle, and PeopleSoft software.

3Com is committed to using Tibco as its integration provider. Although the company is happy with its SAP deployment, says Klaus Schultz, chief technology architect for 3Com, Tibco gives him the freedom to evaluate new software based on how well it meets the company's needs rather than how well it ties back to SAP R/3. It also makes 3Com faster and more responsive to customers. "We treat the entire IT department at 3Com as a trading floor," he says. "There's a bidder and a broker for all information, so the data we crunch and store in the back office is always routed back to our customers, and the faster that happens the better."

VF Corp., a $5.5 billion clothing manufacturer in Greensboro, N.C., has also turned to a middleware specialist to tie its SAP manufacturing and accounting applications to legacy mainframe systems and supply-chain management systems from i2 Technologies Inc. and Logility Inc. "Our approach is to choose the vendors that are best at what they do," says John Davis, VP of supply chain at VF. The ERP vendors "should do more to make their products more open and be willing to cooperate with other vendors that are represented in their installed base."

VF uses integration tools from New Era of Networks to manage the complex interconnections required to take and fulfill orders as well as replenish its customers' supplies.

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