IBM, Mainsoft Announce New Technology, Global Reseller Agreement to Help Enterprise
Customers Bridge Standards Divide
ARMONK, NY - November 19, 2007 - IBM and business partner Mainsoft®
Corporation today announced new technology and a global reseller agreement that
gives enterprise IT customers tools to preserve existing development skills, easily
blend Java™ and .NET technology, and provide composite applications
for business users in a secure and scalable environment.
Under the agreement, IBM will sell Mainsoft's newly available .NET Extensions for
WebSphere® Portal. Mainsoft's custom suite of software products enables
customers to integrate Windows® SharePoint services, Microsoft®
Office document libraries, SQL Server Reports, and .NET applications onto IBM WebSphere®
Portal.
"By working with Mainsoft, IBM WebSphere Portal extends its ability to serve a broad
spectrum of organizations, application types, and developer skill sets with one
common foundation,' said Larry Bowden, IBM's vice president of portals and web interaction
services. "Customers can preserve their existing Microsoft development skills, reuse
existing software assets, and provide a unified experience for their end users,
and now, can take advantage of the scalability, security, and robustness of the
open, standards-based Java WebSphere Portal to deliver an exceptional user experience."
"Virtually all large-scale enterprises use both .NET and Java technologies to develop
their enterprise applications, and by design or happenstance, they develop multiple
portals for the same audience," said Yaacov Cohen, president and CEO, Mainsoft Corporation.
"When this occurs, portals become information silos, aggregating only a subset of
enterprise data, applications, and services. With IBM and Mainsoft, enterprises
can now solve this common business issue and create high-value applications that
integrate .NET assets, SharePoint contents, and Java applications seamlessly in
a secure and scalable portal environment."
Solving Key Business Issues
Customers in banking, financial services, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing,
retail, software development, and public sector are using .NET Extensions to integrate
.NET technologies into WebSphere Portal server and WebSphere Application Server,
without having to reengineer .NET applications or retrain .NET developers in Java.
New customers include:
- Healthways (NASDAQ: HWAY), a leading provider of comprehensive Health
and Care SupportSM solutions, used C# and Java technologies to develop
a customer-facing eFulfillment site running on IBM WebSphere Portal. The self-service
site will give more than 27 million members the ability to query and download personalized
information to help them maintain or improve their health, and as a result, reduce
overall healthcare costs for corporate and insurance plan sponsors. Explains David
Jarmoluk, director of enterprise architecture for Healthways, "The Visual Studio®-based
development experience was highly intuitive for our C# developers, who were developing
Java portlets on day one of a two-day training with Mainsoft consultants. As a result,
Healthways' eFulfillment site went into production just five months after we started
development work." Jarmoluk estimates that the site is expected to pay for itself
in reduced mailing and administrative costs within a year.
- Bayer MaterialScience (BMS), one of the world's largest producers
of polymers and high-performance plastics and an independent subgroup within Bayer
AG, commissioned Mainsoft to integrate its sales reports engine, based on Microsoft
SQL Server Reporting Services, into its WebSphere Portal-based Sales Force Cockpit.
The Intranet site consolidates Bayer's global sales and customer service resources
into a single sign-on, collaborative work environment. According to Michael Becker,
director of organization & information systems, application management for BMS,
"Mainsoft enabled us to integrate our SQL-based sales reports into WebSphere Portal,
which is the basis of our global sales and customer service platform, without having
to re-implement them. Going forward, our team can support a single reporting technology,
which we expect to save us significant time and resources versus maintaining two
separate reporting services."
Other WebSphere Portal projects built using .NET Extensions include a virtual information
service center for Belgian University Hospital Ghent and an Intranet site to consolidate
eight pension funds, and US$3 billion in assets for Opal Pension Funds.
About Mainsoft's .NET Extensions for WebSphere Portal
Mainsoft software is certified Optimized for Visual Studio and has also been validated
as Ready for WebSphere Software. The .NET Extensions product suite includes the
specific features, functionalities, and capabilities of:
- Mainsoft, Portal Edition: This Visual Studio-based
software development kit enables C# and Visual Basic developers to integrate ASP.NET
applications locally on WebSphere Portal as well as customize WebSphere Portal's
infrastructure services. Mainsoft's patented cross compiler produces JSR 168 portlets
from .NET source code. These portlets behave exactly the same as any Java portlet
running locally on the portal.
- Mainsoft SharePoint/SQL Reporting Federator:
This add-on to Mainsoft's Portal Edition enables enterprises to federate existing
SharePoint contents and data and Microsoft's SQL Reporting Services within WebSphere
Portal. It supports WebSphere Portal Server 5.1 and 6.0 and runs on any Java-enabled
platform.
Using IBM and Mainsoft's products, customers can enable existing development teams
to create high value enterprise mash-ups that seamlessly integrate data and applications
from all parts of their organization regardless of the technology foundation.
About Mainsoft Corporation
Mainsoft, a leading .NET-Java EE interoperability company and advanced IBM business
partner, is helping more than 150 businesses deploy Windows applications natively
on open systems, including WebSphere Portal, WebSphere Application Server, and UNIX
and Linux operating systems.
IBM, WebSphere are trademarks of IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries,
or both. Java and all Java-based trademarks are trademarks of Sun Microsystems,
Inc. in the United States, other countries, or both. Other company product or service
names may be trademarks or service marks of others.
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