Global and High Performance Software News

Sterling Commerce released a software solution that enables multi-national organizations to automate electronic invoicing processes worldwide, while Trillium Software delivered the latest version of Trillium Software System for global data quality. In other news, IBM Corp. announces its first SolidDB product for DB2 and Informix Dynamic Server.

Focal Points:

• Sterling Commerce, an AT&T Inc. subsidiary, made generally available its software that makes it possible for global organizations to automate electronic invoicing processes worldwide, while maintaining conformity with individual tax regulations mandated by multiple countries. The software, Sterling e-Invoice Gateway, eliminates the need to support separate solutions for isolated geographies while reducing the risk and exposure by complying with ever-changing electronic invoicing tax regulations, the company claims. Additionally the software improves operational efficiencies and contains costs by automating both buyer and seller electronic invoice processes in compliance with country-specific tax regulations. According to a company executive, the software keeps up with frequently changing business and technical regulations, and can save companies millions in significant losses in the form of fines, costly audits and the inability to reclaim value added tax (VAT).
• Trillium Software, a business of Harte-Hanks Inc., released Trillium Software System version 11.5.  The software has an expanded, fully-integrated set of data profiling, validation and cleansing capabilities across a broader range of countries to meet the global needs of business users who require a more strategic approach for solving data quality challenges throughout their organizations. There is an expanded address validation capability that provides even broader coverage of street and house-level validation in fifteen additional countries. The expanded country projects functionality allows for out-of-the-box country-specific rules for parsing, matching and address reconstruction of data across multiple regions. The software also now runs on IBM mainframes using the z/OS operating system.
• IBM adds a high speed, in-memory option to its DB2 and Informix Dynamic Server products. The in-memory SolidDB relational database can now act as a front end to either database, thereby creating a low-latency, high performance capability front end. The in-memory system has preloaded data likely to be needed into server memory prior to a request, which reduces reliance on disk retrievals. According to IBM, it can support tens of thousands of transactions per second with predictable response times. Three solidDB products will become available June 24, when pricing will be announced. They are the standalone IBM solidDB Release 6.1; solidDB Cache for DB2 6.1 and IBM solidDB Cache for Informix Dynamic Server 6.1.

Experton Group believes the consolidation of software application packages to those designed to address global challenges and differences should improve productivity and reduce costs and should be a component of target application criteria for multi-national organizations. Enterprises that need to enhance their database performance requirements should consider products such as SolidDB's database or Oracle Corp.'s TimesTen as a front-end high performance engine. IT executives should be building enterprise architectures for applications, business processes, information, and infrastructure and ensuring that new or enhanced products and services map to the target architectures rather than implementing short-term non-conforming solutions. While the latter may appear to be less expensive, the total costs for the initial implementation and then subsequent replacement almost always proves to more expensive.