New Products To Address Needs Of Online Marketplaces

Enterprise application integration vendors, eager for a piece of the business-to-business action, are unveiling products designed to make it easier for companies to connect to their partners and suppliers.

Software Technologies Corp. this week will introduce E- business Integrator Suite, which packages an integration engine, e-Gate Integrator, with e-Xchange B2B Integrator, designed to help businesses set up exchanges and collaborative supply chains. Included in e-Xchange are Business Process Manager, which helps companies establish Extensible Markup Language and electronic data interchange workflow and business processes with partners; Secure E- Business Manager, which manages the security of information exchanged between partners; and B2B Partner Manager, which can help businesses quickly set up or remove connections with trading partners by tracking partner IDs and requirements.

Medical exchange Neoforma.com Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif., uses e-Gate to connect hospitals' legacy systems to their suppliers' back-office systems. VP of professional services Denny Brennan welcomes any tools that will make business-to- business integration easier. "We're looking for a solution that best helps us deliver integration out of the box," he says. The suite is available now, starting at $150,000.