Olivetti Chooses 360 Degree B2B for SAP Solutions from Crossgate to Electronically Integrate Its Trade Partners

Multiple benefits for Olivetti: highly reliable, excellence-grade services in line with the company's evolving IT strategy

ATLANTA, July 24 /PRNewswire/ -- Olivetti, a Telecom Italia Group company, has chosen to adopt services from Crossgate -- the world's leading company in cross automation and Business-to-Business (B2B) integration -- for EDI integration of its partners.

With revenues in 2007 amounting to 408 million euro, Olivetti operates in the home and office products, in specialized applications for the banking and retail industries, and in IT automation systems for prognostic games, lotteries and electronic voting systems. The company employs 1260 people, has sales offices in 83 countries (with a strong focus in Europe and the Far East), multiple manufacturing plants, and research and development centers.

The need to rely on an external provider for EDI became apparent when the synergies established with Pirelli were lost upon the latter company's exit from the Telecom Italia Group. The ICT needs for all of the group's companies (which as of spring 2007 included Pirelli, Olivetti, Telecom Italia and TIM) were, in fact, managed by Shared Service Center (SSC), a portion of which gave way to the spin-off that became Pirelli Sistemi Informativi.

In Crossgate Olivetti found its ideal partner, capable of replicating the previous organization with comprehensive services not only related to translating and dispatching inbound and outbound messages to domestic and international trade partners, but also for message collection and transmission services. Such messages are of many different types (orders, deliveries, invoices, logistic procedures, etc), in relatively large volumes.

The implementation of Crossgate services -- consisting in rebuilding all maps and all translations in order to achieve the same output from the previously adopted translation system -- started in November of last year and was completed by mid-March 2008.

Particularly relevant in this project, is that Crossgate EDI services have been implemented on the SAP XI platform, particularly since SAP is also Olivetti's strategic platform of choice. "Today's numbers and internal organization are still inadequate for the implementation of XI, but having our EDI system already based on this platform guarantees easy porting of the solution to a proprietary platform," said Alberto Roviera, IT manager at Olivetti.

The benefits reaped by Olivetti have been substantial: highly reliable, excellence-grade services, consistency with the corporate IT evolution strategy, and fully satisfactory operating costs. And all without losing sight of the fundamental goal of successfully implementing an EDI solution capable of ensuring service continuity, having lost the possibility of ongoing synergies with the rest of the Pirelli Group.

"The implementation went fast and was completed without issues, enabling us to ensure continuity to our services. Crossgate has proven to be an extremely qualified and reliable partner," points out Roviera. "Crossgate's added value is the compatibility of its services with Olivetti's IT strategy, and in particular choosing SAP as the preferred platform."

"We are very pleased to welcome Olivetti among our customers. This alliance shows how, after just a little over 18 months from the opening of our Italian offices, a growing number of companies representing Italy's large industry across the world are choosing Crossgate to streamline their intercompany information flows," points out Antonio Brissa, President of Crossgate Italia S.p.A.

Crossgate, Inc

Crossgate offers the world's first Business-Ready Network, guaranteeing 100% integration of business partners, clients and suppliers. A single connection to the Network means electronic data exchange with any business partner regardless of their technical capability. In addition, Crossgate's B2B-360 degree Services powered by SAP provide clients direct access to all integrated business partners in the B2B transaction network via their SAP systems. With its legally compliant eInvoicing Services, Crossgate also provides an innovative and 100% secure solution to cover the entire process of incoming and outgoing invoices, including signatures, EU compliance monitoring, and revision-secure automated long-term archiving. More than 40,000 business partners, representing over 10 industries, currently exchange documents and data via the Business-Ready Network.

Crossgate was founded in 2001 in Starnberg, Germany. The principal investors are the family of the SAP founder Dietmar Hopp, the Otto Wolff Industrieberatung und Beteiligungen GmbH and the Al-Jomaih Group. In addition to the headquarters in Starnberg, Crossgate is represented at four sites in Germany, with subsidiary branches in Atlanta, London, Milan and Paris. Stefan Tittel is the founder and CEO. For more information, visit http://www.crossgate.com/

  Contact:
  Crossgate, Inc, Steve Sprague
  Steve.sprague@crossgate.com, Tel: 888-422-2360, Fax: 678-348-7444
  http://www.crossgate.com/