Combined Companies Address Growing Order Management Market with Comprehensive End-to-End Solution
DUBLIN, Ohio, Jan. 8, 2006 — Sterling Commerce, the multi-enterprise collaboration company and a subsidiary of AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T), today announced it has completed the acquisition of Comergent Technologies Inc., a developer of e-business software, for approximately $155 million in cash. With the addition of Comergent, Sterling Commerce now delivers a comprehensive end-to-end order management solution that will help companies increase revenue and reduce costs and order fulfillment lead times.
“Sterling is assembling a critical mass and has an opportunity to provide a platform that combines communications and collaborative functionality for the three major faces of e-business: customer-facing, supplier-facing, and logistics-facing,” said Bill Swanton, vice president of research at AMR Research (“Sterling Commerce Acquires Comergent, Rounding Out Managed Services for Supply Chain Execution,” November 29, 2006.)
Together, Sterling Commerce and Comergent solutions address the full spectrum of the order management cycle. By providing a seamless customer experience across both supply and demand processes, Sterling Commerce will enable companies to increase revenue, shorten sales and order fulfillment cycle times, and reduce overall supply chain costs. Comergent offers an e-Business Platform and Application Suite that simplifies and improves selling and distributed order management processes for complex products. These applications complement the existing Sterling Commerce Supply Chain Application Suite. Designed to work easily with existing enterprise applications, the Sterling Commerce Supply Chain Application Suite manages the dynamic and complex processes associated with warehousing, transportation, distributed order fulfillment, and supply visibility.
“Order management, with its multiple touch-points to customers and suppliers, is a difficult process to execute well because it reaches beyond typical enterprise boundaries. We estimate the order management solutions market to be a $5 billion to $7 billion market by 2010,” said Bob Irwin, acting president and CEO for Sterling Commerce. “To achieve growth, organizations must sell broader offerings and reach new markets, and that requires a broad and deep solution for order management – one that addresses the entire order management cycle of buy, sell, ship and pay, but also brings in deep capabilities to handle the complexities at each phase. Only Sterling Commerce can deliver that solution today.”
Sterling Commerce, with its multi-enterprise collaboration (MEC) strategy, excels at problems that reach beyond typical enterprise boundaries by providing solutions that eliminate barriers to working better with an organization’s business community – the organizations outside the four walls of a company, such as customers and supply chain partners. The end-to-end order management process is becoming more complex as customers demand more channel (store, Web, direct, etc) and delivery options and more information throughout the fulfillment process. Sterling Commerce solutions simplify the management of these processes, helping customers manage this increasingly complex environment and therefore gain increased revenue and reduced costs and lead times.
The acquisition will leverage each company’s industry-specific expertise including retail for Sterling Commerce and manufacturing, high tech and telecommunications for Comergent, to address MEC challenges for those industries. Sterling Commerce also leverages services-oriented architecture (SOA) as part of its MEC strategy to allow customers to incrementally adopt new capabilities as an industry or customer dictates. Comergent solutions are built on an SOA that supports deployment as on-premise or managed service offerings. The Comergent managed service solutions complement several solutions Sterling Commerce already offers as part of the company’s efforts to provide a wide range of deployment choices for its customers.
About Sterling Commerce
Sterling Commerce, a subsidiary of AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T), has more than 30 years of leadership and expertise in helping FORTUNE 500® customers thrive in a global economy by optimizing the performance of their business communities. With nearly 30,000 customers worldwide, the company is one of the world’s largest providers of multi-enterprise collaboration solutions. Sterling Commerce has unparalleled experience in the retail, consumer packaged goods, manufacturing, financial services, healthcare and telecommunications industries. For detailed, up-to-date information about Sterling Commerce and its solutions, visit www.sterlingcommerce.com.
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