Spring 2008

Sterling Commerce has joined the growing band of supply-chain solution specialists offering a hosted SaaS (Software as a Service) approach to management.

The company's take on the concept is a new system called Sterling Supply Chain Visibility On Demand. It says this can instantly display and summarise 'actionable' supply chain information from all electronic trading partners and communities through a secure, reliable hosted infrastructure.

Sterling has had a flying start in this initiative. The company says there are more than 19,000 Sterling Collaboration Network customers already, and more than 90 global network 'interconnects'. This means its new system has been able to provides customers with immediate access to more than 270,000 unique trading entities around the globe.

As Josh Hardy, global product line manager for Sterling Collaboration Network, puts it, the new product 'leverages the company's rich heritage in community management with its business process applications to enable companies to reach a new level in how they collaborate with their supply chain ecosystem.'

The SCN suite of services includes Sterling Information Broker, Community Services, Translation Services, Visibility Services and Hosted Application Services.