IBM Launches New Cloud-Based and On Premise Software to Help Clients Deepen Engagement with Partners and Suppliers

ARMONK, NY and TAMPA, FL. - 14 May 2014: At its Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Tampa, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new cloud-based and on premise software to help organizations deepen engagement with their partners and suppliers to ensure goods and services are delivered precisely when and where they are needed.

With its new partner and supplier engagement software, IBM is giving business leaders deeper insight and control over their external business relationships, while reducing associated risks and increasing collaboration. This tightens synchronization across their extended ecosystem, ensuring these complex networks of third-party relationships boost their ability to innovate and gain a competitive advantage. The new offerings further extend IBM's leadership in enabling an adaptive value chain, where it is already helping 160,000 global businesses manage the flow of critical corporate data and mitigate organizational risk.

At a time when organizations are re-inventing themselves around the customer experience, the importance of building deeper partner and supplier engagements has never been greater. According to CAPS Research1, on average businesses spend nearly half of their revenue with their ecosystem of partners and suppliers. Whether an organization has tens, hundreds or even thousands of suppliers and partners, each play a role in delivering an exceptional customer experience.

Now more than ever, the fate of any business is deeply intertwined with the success of its network of partners and suppliers around the world, said John Mesberg, Vice President, B2B & Commerce Solutions, IBM. By orchestrating these complex engagements with extraordinary precision and insight, organizations can create new gateways to trade that enable businesses to deliver exceptional customer experiences. With today's news, IBM fundamentally transforms these dynamics with partners and customers to drive faster time to revenue across the extended value chain.

Today's announcement features new cloud-based and on premise supplier and partner engagement capabilities that drive the following benefits:

Better collaboration for faster time to value: The IBM Multi-Enterprise Relationship Management (MRM) platform enables large organizations to connect and manage shared business processes across a variety of business communities in their ecosystem, including partners, suppliers and customers. MRM also significantly reduces the often tedious onboarding process of trading partners, in some cases cutting time by nearly 90 percent, which results in faster time to revenue.

Deeper insights for better decision making: IBM Sterling B2B Services Reporting and Analytics enhances the IBM Sterling B2B Collaboration Network by monitoring transactions across an organization's ecosystem to help businesses spot performance trends and make better decisions.

Lower risk and enhanced compliance: New enhancements to IBM Standards Processing Engine, Supplier Lifecycle Management and Contract Lifecycle Management solutions will continue to provide companies with capabilities that monitor, manage and action the data associated with risk and compliance with a complete view of their value chain and the ability to more proactively mitigate risk.

Faster and more efficient data sharing: IBM Aspera eXtreme File Transfer enables companies to send big data at maximum speed across any distance while avoiding traditional networking limitations and bottlenecks. IBM Aspera Enterprise File Sync and Sharecompliments this solution by providing teams with the ability to quickly and securely share and exchange data of any size directly from desktop and mobile devices, making it easier than ever to initiate secure high-speed transfers.

Lenovo works with IBM to simplify and deepen their partner and supplier collaboration. Using IBM Sterling B2B Integration Services, Lenovo built a unified foundation to connect and collaborate across its partner ecosystem as well as reduce the time it takes to onboard new partners by 85 percent. By optimizing its supply chain with IBM solutions, Lenovo ensures complete customer satisfaction from purchase through fulfillment, invoicing and servicing.

The path to Lenovo becoming the global PCs leader was not taken alone, said Chuck Igba, Director, B2B/EDI Strategy & Enablement, Lenovo. Our business depends upon more than 325 global trading partners to drive innovation through the organization. By implementing IBM solutions, we provide Lenovos business leaders with a 360-degree view across the ecosystem so they can maximize the value that our partners and suppliers bring to the company."

IBMs Smarter Commerce initiative delivers innovative solutions that help organizations re-invent themselves to enrich and deepen engagement with customers, suppliers and partners.

For information, visit http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/smarter_commerce/overview/ Stay up to date on the latest IBM Smarter Commerce news by following #smartercommerce.

1. Source; CAPS Research, Cross-Industry Report of Standard Benchmarks, June 2012

LINK:	http://www-03.ibm.com/press/uk/en/pressrelease/43924.wss...
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