Ford, Lucent and Lockheed Martin Lead the OAGI Vendor Challenge Driving Delivery of XML Standard-based eCommerce Solutions - Open Applications Group - Company Business and Marketing

Cambridge Telcom Report, March 20, 2000

Member companies of The Open Applications Group (OAGI) announced Thursday their participation in the OAGI Vendor Challenge aimed at delivering B2B interoperability between leading business applications using OAGI standards.

The OAGI Customer Council has issued this challenge in an effort to encourage vendors to deliver e-commerce solutions that are interoperable, standards-based, and can be implemented in the near term. The end user companies that issued the challenge are including products that implement OAGI standards in their plans to implement B2B e-commerce in their enterprises.

"At Ford, we are committed to utilizing the Internet to its fullest in order to best provide what the consumer wants in a totally satisfying way," said Tim Thomasma, lead application architect at Ford and chair of The OAGI Vendor Challenge. "We demand a lot from our software vendors - we want solutions that are built-in, out-of-the-box, plug-and-play and based on open standards so that they work with everything else. The OAGI Vendor Challenge will help to focus vendors on delivering compatible products that we can use today. This isn't a bake-off. We won't be announcing the winner of a competition here. We want all business software able to communicate using industry standard message definitions. The OAGI Vendor Challenge is just a way to start getting this to happen in the software marketplace."

The OAGI Customer Council, including AT&T Wireless, Boeing, DHL, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Ingersoll-Rand, Kraft Foods, Lockheed Martin and Lucent Technologies, is issuing the challenge.

"Lockheed Martin is committed to leveraging interoperability standards to reduce total cost of ownership, and increase the business-oriented agility of its internal information processing systems," said Lockheed Martin's John Leary, Manager of Applications Technology, Enterprise Information Systems (EIS). "The EIS Chief Technology Office and the Lockheed Martin Information Architecture Board (IAB) endorse the concept and plan for the OAGI Vendor Challenge as a means to encourage development of `open, business-content standards' for realizing interoperable interchanges between IT applications."

Bruce Ambler, Senior Manager CIO Strategy Planning and Architecture with Lucent Technologies, said, "It is important that vendors include standard interoperability interfaces in their products so customers can buy packaged software from different vendors that all support plug and play compatibility. "

"When the vendors complete the challenge, we all win," said Dave Connelly, president of the OAGI. "The OAGI is excited to see our standard so widely adopted. It is our privilege to support our members in their efforts to achieve business results through open technology standards."

"For e-business demands, vendors must deliver packaged interoperability, and an open-standard XML environment is a step in the right direction," said AMR Research Analyst Kimberly Knickle in the AMR Research Alert on E-business Technologies. "Products that are successfully adopted by the market will be compatible with other vendors' products. To achieve a much needed critical mass in B2B interoperability, end user companies and vendors must get behind initiatives like the OAGI Vendor Challenge."

Twenty vendors have signed onto the Challenge. They are Bluestone (BLSW), eXcelon Corp., Extricity Software, GloTech Solutions, HK Systems, Inc. (HKS), J. D. Edwards (JDEC), Mercator (MCTR), Netfish Technologies, OnDisplay, Inc., Oracle (ORCL), PeopleSoft (PSFT), PricewaterhouseCoopers, PSDI (PSDI), Requisite Technology, Robocom Systems International (RIMS), SAGA Software (AGS), SupplierMarket.com, Teklogix, Inc., webMethods (WEBM) and Wonderware. Several more vendors are poised to sign up very soon. Daniel Hale from HK Systems, Inc. will act as project manager for the Vendor Challenge.

Vendors who complete the challenge will showcase their products at Canopy International's eBusiness integration laboratory in Boston. Members of the press, industry analysts, and other interested parties will be invited to view the live demonstrations. The products will also be shown at exhibitions and conferences to be announced later.

The business process based Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS) Release 6.2 contains the largest set of Extensible Markup Language (XML) Document Type Definition (DTD) files in the world and goes the farthest towards defining the "digital dial tone" that organizations require to do business in the emerging eWorld. These specifications may be downloaded for free at www.openapplications.org. There are currently at least 50 live sites running OAGIS based XML messages. These sites include many kinds of integration, including eBusiness, Logistics, Financials, and Banking.

The Open Applications Group (www.openapplications.org) is a non-profit consortium focusing on dramatically easier business software interoperability for eBusiness and application interoperability. It is the largest publisher of XML content for business software interoperability in the world. The Open Applications Group also builds and publishes the detail specifications necessary to use the XML content as well as publishing a common middleware API specification that has been endorsed by several major middleware vendors.