White Plains, NY and Westmont, IL — October 11, 2000 — IBM and Silvon Software, Inc. today announced a strategic alliance to market, sell and deliver analytic applications for business performance management to mid-sized manufacturing and distribution companies. Under the agreement, the companies and value-added resellers will jointly market and distribute solutions consisting of Silvon’s Stratum‘ suite of business intelligence applications and IBM's middleware and hardware to the $7 billion North American IT midmarket.
Under the alliance, Silvon’s Stratum suite will be part of IBM’s lead solution for e-business intelligence for mid-size manufacturers and distributors. Silvon will lead with IBM middleware and hardware -- including DB2 Universal Database and AS/400 / RS/6000 servers -- in its marketing of the joint solution. IBM and Silvon will jointly recruit and train a distribution channel that will sell and market the Stratum suite and are rolling out a joint marketing campaign to target the mid-market customer base.
"IBM views this alliance with Silvon as a strategic alliance with great potential that will provide a unique solution for business intelligence and CRM analytics in a number of midmarket industries," said Greg Adams, Vice President, Midmarket Business, IBM Americas. "It offers our customers a viable solution for helping them collect and analyze vital business information that will enable them to manage the performance of their organizations in the fast changing e-world. Silvon is an acknowledged leader in this market segment."
The Stratum suite is designed to help organizations strategically plan, analyze and manage the performance of sales, marketing, manufacturing, procurement, e-business, financial and customer-facing operations. Stratum is powered by Silvon's DataTracker technology and optimized for IBM e-Servers -- a data warehousing and analytical processing platform designed to handle the high daily transaction volumes, large customer numbers, widespread product varieties and complex e-sales channels of manufacturing and distribution businesses. The combination of Stratum with IBM's industry-leading servers and DB2 Universal Database offers the most complete, reliable and cost-effective e-business performance management solution for medium-sized businesses today.
"We are very excited about our alliance with IBM because it will allow us to bring highly functional, completely packaged business performance management solutions to a broader segment of industrial enterprises," said Michael J. Hennel, president and CEO of Silvon. "This relationship will extend the reach of Silvon Stratum solutions by melding our world-class analytic application expertise with IBM's market-leading technology and successful value-added distribution channel."
The IBM-Silvon agreement builds on IBM's Strategic Alliance Initiative. Under the initiative, leading software developers, such as Siebel Systems, i2, Ariba and Vignette gain access to new customers and revenue opportunities through IBM's extensive marketing and sales resources. At the same time, developers lead with IBM's key middleware products, server platforms, storage and services resources.
According to International Data Corporation (IDC) in its "Analytic Applications: 1999 Worldwide Markets and Trends" report, the worldwide analytic application software market is expected is grow from $1.9 billion in 1999 to $5.2 billion in 2003. This represents a compounded growth rate of 28 percent.
"The Silvon and IBM solution is an incredibly robust offering that will give manufacturers and distributors the competitive advantage they need to analyze and manage the key performance indicators of their businesses," said Dave Kieffer, Business Systems Director for Dean Foods. "The collaborative solution offered by these two industry leaders also provides a springboard for leaping beyond corporate performance management to help businesses evaluate and manage their extended supply chains of trading partners and customers, too."
IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. The fastest way to get more information about IBM is through the IBM home page at http://www.ibm.com. The IBM - Silvon alliance is part of a developer initiative through PartnerWorld for Developers (www.developer.ibm.com), a worldwide program designed to help developers reach broader markets, lower their costs of doing business, and take their products to market faster.
Stratum™ is an integrated suite of analytic applications designed by Silvon to help supply chain companies strategically plan, analyze and manage the performance of their sales, marketing, manufacturing, procurement, e-business, financial and customer-focused operations. The Stratum suite features hundreds of pre-built, best-of-breed analytical views and reports based on supply chain-specific business models. This allows business users to gain instant accessibility to information, drill down and examine the data in a number of ways, and make knowledge-based decisions in a matter of minutes. Stratum also offers closed-loop processing functionality for automatically triggering actions in ERP, CRM and other Web-based transaction systems based on analysis findings (for example, generating a purchase order for materials when Stratum identifies that inventory levels for a particular product are becoming low). The product suite allows companies to avoid having to build costly, time-consuming, and generally less functional, solutions from the ground up."
Silvon Software is a global supply chain-focused business intelligence solutions provider headquartered in the western Chicago suburb of Westmont, Illinois. Since 1987, Silvon has focused on software-based business intelligence/analytic application solutions for manufacturing, wholesale distribution and retail organizations. Silvon solutions are predicated on the fact that better business understanding will empower the move toward an optimized Supply Chain organization. Silvon clients benefit from improving business practices and profitability by leveraging analytic information on customer, supplier, and operational profitability measurement. Silvon's analytic applications run on the IBM AS/400,Windows NT and Unix. Silvon provides professional services and global support along with a network of OEMs, value-added resellers and independent distributors. The company's solutions are currently installed in more than 1,200 sites worldwide.
Tim O'Malley
IBM Software
Phone: 914-642-3223
tomalley@us.ibm.com
Pat Hennel
Silvon Software, Inc.
Phone: 630-655-3313
pat.hennel@silvon.com