IBM has acquired PureEdge Solutions
IBM has completed its acquisition of PureEdge, a leading provider of electronic forms-based business process management software and services. PureEdge Solutions Inc. is a privately held company established in 1993 with approximately 70 employees. It is based in Victoria, BC Canada with sales offices across the United States. The financial details of this acquisition are not being disclosed.
PureEdge provides a business process automation framework composed of products, partnerships and services to create, manage and deploy XML forms-based processes. The demand for e-forms, especially in vertical industries, has been growing significantly over the last few years. An electronic form can be much more than an accurate reproduction of an equivalent paper form. E-forms offer improvements over paper that enhance the user experience and dramatically improve organizational efficiency.
Through a rich end-user interface and powerful integration capabilities, PureEdge e-forms create seamless, flexible and sophisticated e-business systems. PureEdge’s unique capabilities stem from its ability to develop solutions that are used by large organizations to create seamlessly integrated systems for e-business and e-government. This enables customers to integrate an intelligent front-end with high-value back-end systems, and it helps businesses and governments to securely leverage existing sources and systems to better serve customers and increase operational efficiency.
PureEdge technology complements IBM’s Lotus strategy by providing an open standards framework that integrates people, processes and information to customer’s business value, and is a leading proponent of open standards around the e-forms market space. PureEdge participates in a wide range of industry associations and standards bodies and has been influential in supporting the xForms standard.
IBM has been in the forms-based processing market for 20 years with different evolutions of the Lotus Notes/Domino infrastructure. Nearly every electronic form in IBM is processed using Lotus Domino technology. Over 60,000 customers and 5,000 Business Partners have millions of applications based on Lotus Domino’s forms capability.
PureEdge is a logical extension to the extensive forms-based application development process in Lotus Notes.
PureEdge will enhance IBM Lotus and WebSphere Portal software with new capabilities, such as offline processing, digital signing of multi-part forms, attachment handling, and it automates the generation of intuitive, wizard-driven business applications.
PureEdge represents an evolution in IBM’s support for open standards forms-based processing, using XML, Java, XForms and Eclipse technology.
PureEdge is integrated with WebSphere and DB2 Content Manager software. Additional integration with Lotus Domino and IBM Lotus software will be available soon.
PureEdge complements IBM Industry Solutions, being applicable in 29 of 37 IBM software solutions.
PureEdge has been an important IBM Business Partner and has worked closely with IBM during multiple customer engagements. PureEdge’s superior technology, support for open standards and expertise in this area have made it one of the industry’s leading providers of business process management technology. The combination of PureEdge and IBM technology creates a solution that is more strategically important to customers than either company’s products sold separately, and PureEdge will add strategic value to IBM's broader portfolio of On Demand software solutions through tight alignment with IBM Lotus, IBM's WebSphere® and IBM Content Management offerings.
