iWay Software's B2B Suite Simplifies Complex Trading Environments

AkzoNobel Connects Easily With Business Units, Partners, and Suppliers Worldwide


NASHVILLE, TN--(Marketwire - June 9, 2009) - iWay Software, an Information Builders company and an innovator of enterprise integration solutions, today announced the release of iWay Software B2B Suite 6.0, an expanded product that quickly and easily maintains partner agreements and deploys trading relationships across secure Internet standard protocols. With an advanced, intuitive user interface, extensibility and operability with Information Builders integration and business intelligence (BI) products, iWay Software's Business-to-Business (B2B) Suite allows enterprises like AkzoNobel to effectively manage B2B communications with multiple partners using any number of different message sets and protocols.

A key component of the new iWay B2B Suite, iWay Trading Partner Manager, manages the information and infrastructure of trading partners by making B2B interactions a natural extension of an organization's application integration efforts. It also simplifies the management of complex environments within an organization. B2B channels are arteries through which all business flows. A typical company with hundreds of suppliers, consumers and business partners might use hundreds of transaction types, with each transaction including four to eight messages. Organizations with one or two business partners may not find this challenging, but as they add more partners, they need better control over how they interact with them.

AkzoNobel, one of the world's largest specialty chemical companies, is deploying iWay Trading Partner Manager to manage relationships with partners and distributors around the world. It connects all business units worldwide as well as suppliers, transportation companies, and customers across multiple trading networks. The product has simplified the ramp up of new partners and management of existing relationships, giving the company an advantage in the highly competitive chemical manufacturing market.

iWay Trading Partner Manager, formerly named iWay Trading Manager, features a GUI application and additional run-time capabilities that enable organizations to more easily manage complex environments with many message types, services, communication protocols, security requirements, and more. Highlights include:

--  Thin Web Client, Ajax-Enabled Administration User Interface. With an
    easy-to-use, fast and efficient front end, TPM delivers an interactive
    application within a visually compelling framework that enables quick and
    easy management of even the most complex of trading partner environments
--  Audit Manager. Called automatically at points during the message
    lifecycle, Audit Manager can be configured to record any stage of message
    processing. It can be accessed from the Web console for transaction review.
    The Audit Manager is designed to be extended or replaced depending on
    business requirements
--  Correlation Manager. Identifies the state of a message (send,
    technical acknowledgement, satisfaction), what acknowledgments are expected
    for each message, and whether they have been executed. This can also be
    used to monitor service-level agreements (SLAs)
--  Trading Partner Information and Trading Partner Profile Facilities.
    Provides access to variables about each trading partner, correlation
    information, and other important B2B information. This includes
    transformations and process flows used for each partner, access keys (e.g.,
    ISA06), error handler contacts, DUNS numbers, and more
--  Highly Extensible Object-Oriented Architecture. Designed for set up
    and management of all kinds of partner interactions within a flexible and
    adaptable architecture from peer to peer to VAN networks, across multiple
    protocols, such as AS2 and ebXML, using established EDI message sets and
    custom data dictionaries
--  Integrated With WebFOCUS-Based iWay Business Activity Monitor. Users
    can leverage TPM not only to manage trading partners, but also to monitor
    business activity with them for increased insight to better measure,
    understand, and maximize the value of their partner relationships
    

"iWay has a successful history of helping customers tackle extraordinarily complex infrastructure challenges with our B2B solutions," said Gerald Cohen, founder and CEO of Information Builders. "iWay's B2B Suite provides an easy gateway to set up and maintain a small or large number of partner relationships in a highly reliable and easy-to-manage framework. It lets our customers focus on relationships rather than integration."

About iWay Software

iWay Software's integration methodology is simple: it uses a single, integrated set of graphical design tools to assemble powerful pre-built components for enterprise-class business-to-business (B2B) integration, business process automation (BPA), or enterprise information management (EIM) integration scenarios -- without the use of custom code. Integration configurations can be deployed in a stand-alone manner to any environment supporting a JVM -- or to Web application servers from any vendor. iWay delivers the fastest, most cost-effective, and simplest way to integrate and streamline critical business processes. iWay Software's vendor-, platform-, and protocol-neutral solutions achieve the promise of SOA: true reusability. For more information visit: http://www.iwaysoftware.com

About Information Builders

Information Builders' award-winning combination of business intelligence and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions to more than 12,000 customers for the past 30 years. WebFOCUS is the world's most widely utilized business intelligence platform. It provides the security, scalability and flexibility needed at every level of global extended enterprises. Its simplicity helps create executive, analytical, and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users. Information Builders' iWay Software suite provides state of the art, multi-purpose, pre-built integration components that address all SOA, application, data and information management requirements. Its integration adapters have been adopted by the leading software platform providers. Together, these products give Information Builders' customers the ability to grow and innovate according to their needs.

Information Builders' customers include most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,450 people and has more than 350 business partners. More information is available at http://www.informationbuilders.com.

Contact Information: Press Contacts: Kathleen Moran Information Builders (917) 339-6313 Karyn Martin Emerge PR (617) 729-3173