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IBM and Siebel Systems Inc. announced today an extension to their current Global Strategic Alliance that brings IBM into the heart of Siebels Universal Application Network initiative.
Conceptually, UAN is Siebels integration play. The company had originally developed a point-to-point enterprise application integration product but supplanted that with the much broader UAN initiative.
UAN is a standards-based approach to the design and development of business process applications. Its comprised of three basic components: A library of pre-built business processes, common object models and transformation maps; a business process design tool for modeling and configuring the business process flows, common object models and transformation maps; and an integration server that coordinates inter-application communication.
Under the terms of their expanded agreement, IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., becomes a top-level strategic UAN partner to Siebel, of San Mateo, Calif.
Essentially, the first major version release of Siebel UAN will operate on the IBM WebSphere Business Integration platform.
At heart, the alliance combines Siebel Systems best practice business processes with IBMs WebSphere integration software. IBM and Siebel will deliver a joint integration solution for UAN—which combines Siebels business processes with IBMs WebSphere Business integration software.
Seibel will also license IBM business process templates and common object models to accelerate the development of its pre-built business process library.
IBM and Siebel plan to expand their joint marketing and sales programs to Siebel customers interested in UAN. As part of this initiative, the two companies will open Joint Solutions Showcase Centers worldwide, where customers can check out demonstrations of the WebSphere Integration server and UAN business processes.
At the same time, customers using Siebels point-to-point connectors to third-party applications will be offered a migration path to the UAN solution.
As the first end user of UAN, Siebel will use IBM WebSphere Business Integration to optimize the execution of its own sales, marketing, and service business processes, replacing its current homegrown point-to-point integration software.
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