Event
Summary
Peregrine Systems, a growing force in providing B2B e-commerce and infrastructure
management for mid- to large-sized companies, is buffing the details of
a number of its offerings. Having made its initial foray into e-procurement
by promising to aid in both the acquisition and tracking of capital assets
(First Look: Peregrine Offers Cradle to Grave Procurement), the company
now wants to help its customers get rid of those assets whose life history
it has helped track. It has entered into a strategic partnership with
ZoneTrader, Inc., a B2B eMarketplace for used and surplus capital equipment.
Peregrine has also made an equity investment in ZoneTrader, whose other
investors include Ford Motor Company and Dow Chemical.
The
partnership will enable Peregrine customers to transfer the complete history
of their disposable capital assets to ZoneTrader; the procurement, maintenance
and repair record kept by Peregrine's Get.Resources! and AssetCenter
software is predicted to make these assets more desirable in the market
than other less documented ones. Peregrine customers will also be able
to acquire assets through ZoneTrader. The logical next step, having the
Peregrine record follow the asset to the new customer (and, if the buyer
also uses Peregrine, having it imported into the buyer's AssetCenter)
is not yet available but is planned for early implementation.
A
second announcement puts Peregrine together with New Era of Networks,
Inc, in the real-time integration of Peregrine's e-commerce and infrastructure
management products with the leading ERP and CRM products, such as those
from SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and Siebel.
Where
Peregrine's Get.Resources! and AssetCenter products currently handle the
request and approval steps in the ordering process, once these products
are integrated with NEON's Peregrine Accelerator (as the new offering
will be called) the employee would also be able to validate the request
against the purchasing rules in the ERP system. Customers will also be
able to close the purchase order and manage its fulfillment with the ERP
system.
On
the CRM side a typical integration point would be between a CRM vendor's
help desk product and Peregrine's ServiceCenter. If the CRM product determines
the problem to be IT related it can pass the information to ServiceCenter,
which opens a ticket and manages the customer interaction. When the interaction
is complete, ServiceCenter passes a completion notice to the main CRM
system, which closes its own ticket. Neon's accelerators link different
vendor processes, enabling real-time integration of data and process flow.
Previously, Peregrine had been able to offer only batch data transfers.
The
third Peregrine announcement revealed a new version of the company's TrustedLink
software. TrustedLink is a product that came to Peregrine with its acquisition
of Harbinger, now the eBusiness Connectivity Group. TrustedLink e-Version
5 adds XML capabilities to this middleware application that provides application-to-application
connectivity between business partners, or between business processes
of a single company.
The
new e-Version 5 is a specific release of the TrustedLink Software for
the AS400, UNIX and NT platforms. This version provides IP connection
to Get2Connect.net, Peregrine's B2B e-Commerce exchange, to provide low
cost transaction management, customer support (such as electronic software
distribution) and many other eBusiness services. A major advantage of
the upgrade, according to the company, is that documents will be both
machine- and human readable.
Market
Impact
Partnering with ZoneTrader completes Peregrine's asset management vision
in a strong way. The used asset marketplace is a significant source of
revenue or assets for many categories of business, and seems to be particularly
well suited for e-commerce. Both Peregrine and ZoneTrader get a boost
from this.
We
suspect that the new version of TrustedLink will prove more important
for what it represents than for any boost to Peregrine's new sales. It
tells us that Peregrine continues to upgrade its software to use or be
compatible with XML. There's no reason to imagine that XML's chances to
be the dominant medium for eCommerce communication will be diminished
in the near future, and Peregrine is making the right move by continuing
what seems to be an aggressive conversion schedule.
The
Accelerator product built with NEON helps position Peregrine as a virtual
full-service provider, making it easier for them to compete in the e-procurement
area with such ERP giants as Oracle and SAP.
User
Recommendations
There's no bad news here for users that we can see. Each of these enhancements
adds value to Peregrine's offerings and, depending on your requirements,
can add points to Peregrine in a pre-purchase comparison.
Note,
though, that only TrustedLink Version 5 actually exists at present. Both
the ZoneTrader and NEON partnerships are just starting, and may take months
to reach market. In the meantime there are other avenues open to you.
NEON, for example, has already partnered with Commerce One to produce
a similar set of accelerators and connectors, and every vendor of front-office
applications (including Peregrine) has previously claimed easy integration
to back-end systems.
If
batch connectivity is sufficient then you'll have more options than if
you need the real-time process integration to be provided by NEON.