Aspen Technology Inc. and IBM Corp. have expanded an agreement so the two companies can work more closely together to help process industry manufacturers improve supply chain operations.
The alliance, which dates back to December 1999, targets makers of chemicals, paper, petroleum, plastics, and pharmaceuticals. Under the expanded alliance, IBM will offer AspenTech's IP/21 data historian instead of its competing CIPROS product, says AMR Research Inc. CIPROS has a significant market share in Europe.
In exchange, Aspen Technology has agreed to use IBM's DB2 Universal Database, Netfinity servers, and MQ Series message queuing middleware. In addition, IBM Global Services will perform systems integration work on Aspen Technology projects.