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NEW YORK—IBM Corp. on Tuesday announced a number of new integration technologies designed to better meet enterprises needs for connecting disparate applications and technologies and automating business processes.
“What we see is businesses around the world are obsessed with integration,” said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of IBMs Software Group in his opening remarks at IBMs Integration Media Day here. “Businesses are having to deal with integration challenges that come in a variety of forms—how do institutions work together, how do people work together, how do processes connect, and all the process flows associated with that.”
To that end, IBM announced 11 new WebSphere Integration Adapters focused on four industries—health care, energy and utilities, automotive and electronics. These adapters will be available next month.
The adapters can be used to connect and automate business processes between applications, mainframe products, e-business architectures, technology protocols and trading partners, IBM officials said.
New adapters are for IndusConnect Framework, Maximo MEA, QAD MFG/PRO, Healthcare Data Protocols, COM, CORBA, Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, IBM iSeries, Natural and IDMS Database.
Separately, IBM business partners have developed 300 WebSphere adapters of their own, IBM announced Tuesday.
IBM also announced a new version of its WebSphere MQ Extended Security Edition, version 5.3. This version adds security capabilities from IBMs Tivoli Access Manager product to provide a secure messaging environment for exchanging information across multiple platforms.
Lastly, IBM formally announced the new Lotus Workplace platform. As previously reported by eWEEK, Lotus Workplace combines the collaboration capabilities of Lotus products with the WebSphere Portal Framework. Lotus Workplace Messaging, announced last month, was the first product on the new platform. Lotus is expected to release products for document management, instant messaging and portals on the Workplace platform later this year and next year.