At first glance, Sterling Commerce’s recent unveiling of its Sterling Business Integration Suite seemed little more than a repackaging of its existing business-to-business and managed file transfer products. Although officials at the company’s recent Customer Connection conference promised that the Business Integration Suite will in the future feature bundles of Sterling products that will be easier to buy and deploy, outside of a new release of Sterling Integrator 5.0 (formerly Gentran Integration Suite), there was little new functionality included in the announcement.
But a closer look and interviews with Sterling’s top executives indicate that the Business Integration Suite announcements signal a strategic shift for the vendor of business-to-business integration and sales and fulfillment applications. Perceiving that its customers want to pare down the number of technology providers with which they work, Sterling now wishes to be perceived as a strategic provider of a broad range of integration products and services, not just a vendor of EDI software, said President and CEO Bob Irwin.
“Today we are competing with SAP and Oracle on a transaction level, but we want to compete with them on a strategic relationship level,” said Irwin, in an interview with Managing Automation. “Customers are rationalizing their vendors, reducing down to five or so strategic suppliers. We want to be in the fifth seat.”
While Sterling — which AT&T has owned since 2000 — has no plans to enter the ERP market, the company does intend to expand the scope of its products to address enterprise integration as well as B2B integration, taking on existing providers in that market, such as IBM, Software AG, and Seeburger as well as Oracle and SAP. Today, Sterling officials said, 70% to 80% of the company’s customers use its tools such as Sterling Integrator and Gentran only for B2B integration, and not for integrating internal systems.