PRESS RELEASE
January 24, 2002
Centerprise and IBM Named Winner of CompTIA's ASPire Award for Best Practices in Integration
Recognizes Successful Integration of Enterprise Management Systems into Single Framework
NEW YORK - IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Centerprise Services, Inc. have been named winners in the second annual CompTIA ASP section ASPire Awards program, which highlights best practices in the application service provider (ASP) industry. The award was announced at the Internet World Fall 2001 Conference in December in New York City.
IBM and Centerprise Services were selected in the Integration category for providing a flexible systems integration and management module within Centerprise's broader enterprise management application suite. Centerprise Services, a software and services provider of an enterprise system solution built for the financial services industry's wholesale capital markets sector, offers both ASP and traditional software license solutions.
A case study abstract detailing the award-winning entry is
available at
http://www-4.ibm.com/software/webservers/commerce/casestudies/centerprise.pdf.
"Our suite of products, CenterSphere, is a modular enterprise system built specifically for commercial and investment banks," said Reto Tuffli, CEO at Centerprise. "Just as manufacturing companies have relied on ERP solutions to gain operational efficiencies and are now using them to realize e-business strategies, we're seeing growing interest in our enterprise approach in the financial services space where C-level executives are seeking out comprehensive enterprise solutions to simultaneously address operating costs, risk management and control issues, as well as outsourcing, co-sourcing and other e-business strategies. The bottom line is that industry and equity analysts, the financial and business media and more importantly shareholders are all paying close attention and CenterSphere is our very timely response to that need."
"Application integration functionality is absolutely key to this evolution, and thus to our product offering," he added. "As you can imagine, we're delighted to have won this award with IBM, with whom we've worked closely on many fronts, and whose MQSeries set of middleware products are integrated throughout our enterprise solution. ConnectionCenter, one of our many application modules, is central to our value proposition: significantly reducing the number of systems that need to be managed and maintained, and delivering substantial savings in expenditures across many administrative and IT internal departments, including internal and external auditing expenses."
The Centerprise ConnectionCenter module gives capital markets firms an integrated framework to monitor key reporting systems and the data feeds they are required to provide. Firms can monitor daily feeds and their status, the types of data they contain, the organizational entities they cover and the transformation required to normalize data into a consistent format. Production model driven automated e-business processes can be associated with their respective data feeds, enabling conditional business logic to be triggered by the data feed.
According to Reza Ghorieshi, global technical strategist in the IBM Software Group and chairman of the ASP Industry Consortium Best Practices Committee, "Centerprise has leveraged WebSphere MQ, IBM's industry leading messaging software, to provide capital market solutions that are successfully handled and managed at the enterprise level. The combined effort between the two organizations can benefit the customer through reduced cost, increased efficiency and more immediate access to integrated financial solutions."
A key goal during CenterSphere's two-year development was
to provide the ability to administer, integrate and transform data feeds from
existing legacy systems, which, according to Eric Yu, Centerprise's CTO, "had
to be an integral part of our general enterprise application. EAI capability
is also a key requirement for a robust ASP service offering. The combination
of IBM's WebSphere MQSeries, MQSeries Integrator and MQSeries Workflow gave
us the broad message brokering technology we were looking for. Our ConnectionCenter
module brings these technologies together further, putting them in an organizational
and workflow context, which is critical for enterprise level management."
Thirty-year IBM veteran Dean Keister, now head of network
architecture for Centerprise, added, "Messaging, queuing, data transformation
and process management must all work together to be effective. Large banks literally
have hundreds of software systems and data sources providing feeds on a daily
or more frequent basis for enterprise reporting needs. Smaller financial firms
have different requirements, such as looking for flexible application hosting
configurations for outsourcing or co-sourcing ASP solutions. CenterSphere successfully
serves both ends of the customer spectrum."
The ASPire awards honored best practices in the ASP industry
in five categories: delivery and enablement; integration; management and operations;
service satisfaction; and innovative technology-wireless. An independent review
board comprised of ASP industry experts from International Data Corporation
(IDC), Gartner, Dataquest, McKinsey & Co. and Enterprise Management Associates
selected the category winners.
About Centerprise
Centerprise is a technology solutions software and services company that offers a broad, integrated, yet modular enterprise management system developed specifically for the financial services industry and, in particular, for the wholesale capital markets sector. The CenterSphereTM suite of products, designed from the ground up to facilitate the management and control of the financial enterprise, integrates all the key managerial disciplines into a single framework, achieving a new level of cost efficiency for the enterprise not previously possible.
At the same time, the framework is flexible, and components can be implemented incrementally as needed, including: organization and accountability management; portfolio (position) management; financial reporting (GL); enterprise-wide business process management; market, credit, and operational risk management; analytics; daily trading P&L reporting and attribution; CRM; HR; legal and compliance; audit management; market and enterprise data management; and application integration management.
CenterSphere is the first enterprise system built specifically for
the requirements of capital market organizations by capital market veterans.
For more information, visit visit www.centerprise.com.
About IBM
Drawing on resources from across the company and 90,000 Business
Partners, IBM offers a host of cross-industry and industry-specific solutions
designed to meet the needs of growing companies and help them leverage the potential
of the Internet and network computing.
About CompTIA
CompTIA, the Computing Technology Industry Association, provides
the technology community standards in the areas of Internet-enabled service
provision, e-commerce,
vendor-neutral technical certification, CRM, public policy, workforce development
and training.
Contact:
Martin Rabkin
martinrabkin, inc.
+1-845-425-1064
mrabkin@optonline.netor
IBM
Andrea Minoff
aminoff@us.ibm.com
+1-914-642-5898