ACADEMIA

New Identity-Enabled B2B Integration Solution is Industry's First to Include Market-Leading Identity Management to Securely Manage, Automate System-to-System Communication Among Trading Partners: Sun Microsystems has announced the availability of the Sun's Identity-Enabled Business-to-Business (B2B) solution, the industry's first technology to securely centralize and automate management of large numbers of transactions and trading partners across different enterprise applications and systems. Combining identity management with comprehensive B2B integration technologies, the Sun's Identity-Enabled B2B solution works with all major operating systems including the Solaris Operating System (OS), simplifies business processes and helps enterprises fully realize the benefits of a large scale services-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure framework. This new Sun Java System B2B Suite 2.0 is comprised of Sun's B2B solution, part of the Sun Java Composite Application Suite (CAPS), and Sun's identity management products. Today's enterprises need to share data with hundreds of thousands of trading partners daily, often through "one-off" custom integrations that connect heterogeneous environments with technology from multiple vendors. As companies tackle larger B2B integration projects, these corporations are challenged with developing a B2B platform that can be re-used across multiple projects and which can provide a single point of entry into the company's firewalls. Sun has designed a fully-integrated single-vendor solution that helps to ensure safe policy and transaction synchronization and secures access control management. "Software innovation has been the core of Sun's success over the past 25 years and we continue this tradition in delivering the world's first Identity-Enabled B2B integration solution for our enterprise customers," said Jim McHugh, vice-president, Software Infrastructure, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Secure business integration is a fundamental driver of technology adoption and Sun continues to work with enterprises to develop automated standards-based solutions that enable them to grow their businesses through trading partners." Adding Identity to B2B Deployments Sun now offers the only solution to combine identity management with comprehensive B2b integration, providing a cohesive platform with unmatched scalability, flexibility and cost savings. The addition of identity management provides a safe environment for customers to manage and audit transactions across the network and allows companies to adhere to compliance and standards as they grow their B2B deployments. Sun's own IT department is deploying the solution to help better manage users, projects and other resources across the company in a secure environment. The dynamic department is fully committed to moving all of Sun's internal B2B infrastructure to a Java CAPS platform, representing support for hundreds of Sun's business partners and management of billions of dollars in inventories, invoices, orders and other revenue-related line items. "Our first phase will be delivered in Sun's fourth quarter FY'07 and will allow us to consolidated our current assets onto one single platform. Subsequent deployments will move towards a fully integrated Java CAPS B2B infrastructure that will allow Sun IT to utilize the full stack of Java CAPS tools and simply our business processes while saving money." said Mike Ricigliano, Senior IT Manager, Enterprise Messaging and Integration Services, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "The key benefits [of using B2B solutions] are improved productivity, shorter cycle times, lower processing costs, and improved customer service. Organizations that have not already implemented electronic information exchange systems should assess projected improvements in these areas to establish the business case for implementing B2B integration technology in the context of broader process improvement initiatives," writes Ken Vollmer, senior principal analyst, Forrester Research in "Justifying B2B Integration" (February 9, 2007). For more information on Sun's identity-enabled B2B solution, please visit: its Web site.