The first phase in the electronic-marketplace alliance formed by IBM, i2 Technologies and Ariba is now complete, with the vendors working on making their products interoperate with the aim of creating a business-to-business (B2B) platform.
The three companies also are working on B2B standards as part of the alliance, formed in March of this year. The three announced the end of phase one in a statement Tuesday and also offered a progress report and roadmap during a presentation at an Ariba conference in Miami.
The first phase required the efforts of 300 software developers globally and has led to interoperability of baseline components of Ariba's B2B Commerce Platform and i2's TradeMatrix software with IBM hardware and middleware, including WebSphere Business-to-Business Integrator, DB2 Universal Database and Tivoli e-Marketplace Manager.
Interoperability work will continue through the end of this year, the companies said, with efforts also focused on porting components of Ariba's platform to the IBM application server and hardware platforms. Further TradeMatrix will be expanded to use more of the WebSphere line.
Additional details regarding the alliance and the interoperability work can be found online at http://www.ibm-i2-ariba.com/.