DETROIT -- Enterprise resource planning software vendor QAD Inc., in a bid to provide customers with a more complete, globally-supported electronic data interchange (EDI) solution, said it has entered into a partnership with Sterling Commerce (Dublin, OH), a provider of EDI communication and translation products and services.
Under the deal, QAD (Carpinteria, CA) will market a version of Sterling's Gentran Integration Suite, a business-to-business electronic commerce product that enables EDI transactions and translation between different EDI and Web-based document formats. QAD said it will market the Gentran product as the QAD Total eCommerce Solution. QAD will provide worldwide support for the product, according to Michelle Seibert, director of global consulting services at QAD.
Prior to the deal with Sterling, QAD had offered its own product, EDI Commerce, which enabled the company's ERP software -- MFG PRO -- to receive and send EDI messages. EDI Commerce, however, lacked translation features, so QAD applications couldn't exchange messages with applications using different EDI or Web-based formats.
By adding translation, QAD is closing the loop and providing an important feature it was lacking," said Judy Sweeney, research director at AMR Research (Boston.) QAD's EDI Commerce product will now be bundled into the new Total eCommerce Solution.
The new QAD-Sterling partnership, announced at the AutoTech Conference here, is an outgrowth of QAD's May, 2004, acquisition of the portion of Oxford Consulting Group Inc. (Charlotte, NC) that was involved with QAD EDI implementation projects. Oxford had also deployed Sterling's Gentran Integration Suite product at about 80 QAD customer sites, Seibert said. The QAD-Sterling partnership means those customers will be able to receive continued support for their EDI deployments directly from QAD.
"The deal protects those customers who were sold Gentran under the former (QAD-Oxford) partnership," said AMR's Sweeney. "It also gives QAD's other customers access to some nice capabilities that they might be interested in."
In addition to the EDI communication and translation features, Gentran Integration Suite also includes enterprise application integration features. Gentran Integration Suite is also available as a hosted service. QAD's Seibert said the company will market and support the hosted version of the product.
QAD also has expanded global support for its EDI solutions. The EDI consulting unit acquired from Oxford included about 15 employees. That consulting group has been doubled to 30 people, all dedicated to deploying the Total eCommerce Solution, Seibert said.
"Many of our customers like Black and Decker have said they want a global, consistent solution," said Seibert. "Right now they are often required to use third parties to deploy EDI in different regions. They wanted us to offer support so that, when they move operations, they don't have to worry about where the support will come from."
Separately at AutoTech, QAD announced that it will donate to the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) its own implementation of the Inventory Visibility & Interoperability standard. Created by AIAG in cooperation with QAD, IV&I is a set of processes and protocols that gives automotive companies visibility into inventory levels of cooperating supply partners.
QAD had implemented IV&I as part of its Supply Visibility product. The company said its IV&I source code will be downloadable -- free of charge -- from AIAG's Web site.