SAP announced it intends to buy Crossgate, a company based in Munich, Germany, that provides electronic data exchange services to enterprises that need secure and reliable channels to exchange documents and data with multiple trading partners.
SAP
plans to buy out Crossgate, a business-to-business electronic data
exchange service that allows trading partners to securely transmit critical
business information, including production orders, specifications and invoices.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Crossgate,
which was founded in 2001 and is based in Munich, Germany, allows enterprises
to set up dedicated secure data links with trading partners, clients and
suppliers regardless of their IT capabilities. Crossgate's service currently
enables 40,000 business partners in many different industries to security
exchange documents and data, according to SAP.
Electronic
data exchanges have been used for many years, even before the explosive growth
of the Internet in the 1990s, to provide a secure data exchange channel between
trading partners. Electronic data exchanges are often used by major
manufacturers-such as auto makers, aircraft builders and defense
industries-that need to exchange massive amounts of data with an army of
suppliers.
While
the Internet has helped simplify the implementation of electronic data
exchanges, these systems are used in supply chain and trading applications that
transmit a huge volume of data. These applications are used when casual links
over email or through Web applications are neither secure nor reliable enough
to handle the traffic volume.
Through
this acquisition, SAP will be able to integrate the Crossgate electronic data
exchange with SAP's portfolio of enterprise resource planning (ERP)
applications. The Crossgate offering includes e-invoicing services that cover
the entire process of inbound and outbound invoices, including signatures and
compliance monitoring that can be integrated with customers' back-end systems
and finance processes, according to SAP.
"Companies
live in an evolving global network of customers and partners, and technology
from Crossgate allows them to interact in new ways at the enterprise level the
same way that social networking has transformed the way people interact as
individuals," Peter Maier, general manager and head of Line of Business
Solutions at SAP AG, said in a statement.
"By
acquiring Crossgate's highly differentiated solution, we help our customers
extend their end-to-end business processes running on SAP to their customers
and partners. As a result, thousands of SAP customers will join the network to
exchange information easier, execute transactions faster and collaborate
better," the statement said.
SAP
became a minority investor in Crossgate in 2008. Soon after that, SAP signed a
reseller agreement to market the Crossgate B2B Content Engine as the SAP
Information Interchange Application by Crossgate. More recently, SAP agreed to
resell the SAP E-Invoicing for Compliance application by Crossgate, which
allows companies to send and receive digitally signed PDFs or electronic data
interchange invoices.
In
his statement about SAP's acquisition of his company, Stefan Tittel,
Crossgate's CEO and founder, suggested that electronic data exchange will take
on aspects of social networking through business applications that let trading
partners build relationships.
"With
combined social network paradigms and service extensions of business
applications, SAP and Crossgate now have the potential to change the face of
business networks and deliver a new level of collaboration to SAP customers and
their business network partners," Tittel said in his statement. "Our
executive management team is excited about the possibility of bringing the
Crossgate mission to the next level together with SAP. Our customers will
experience business networking that is simple, compelling and efficient."
John Pallatto is eWEEK.com's Managing Editor News/West Coast. He directs eWEEK's news coverage in Silicon Valley and throughout the West Coast region. He has more than 35 years of experience as a professional journalist, which began as a report with the Hartford Courant daily newspaper in Connecticut. He was also a member of the founding staff of PC Week in March 1984. Pallatto was PC Week's West Coast bureau chief, a senior editor at Ziff Davis' Internet Computing magazine and the West Coast bureau chief at Internet World magazine.
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