Lawson Software to Market TSI’s Mercator with INSIGHT II Commerce Suite
Joanna Doyle
TSI International Software Ltd. (Wilton, Conn.) and Lawson Software Inc. (St. Paul, Minn.) have entered into an agreement that authorizes Lawson to resell TSI’s Mercator integration software as part of the Lawson INSIGHT II Collaborative Commerce Suite. The combined product is designed to provide INSIGHT II users with XML-to-any transformation and integration.
The first enterprise to implement the INSIGHT II with Mercator is a new online marketplace called 2TheMart.com, an interactive e-commerce site featuring both fixed-price and auction-based purchasing. The company utilizes the combined offering from Lawson and TSI to enable integration between Lawson applications and the IBM Net.Commerce product. 2TheMart.com’s overall e-business infrastructure, with the Lawson-TSI product as a central element, provides an integrated solution to assist the company’s business partners in implementing effective methods for and keeping track of reporting, warehousing and distribution.
“The Lawson Collaborative Commerce Suite, which leverages the strength of Mercator for XML integration and transformation, provides key capabilities to support our rapidly growing e-commerce site,” said Robert Allende, CTO at 2TheMart.com.
The INSIGHT II Collaborative Commerce Suite is an integrated set of preconfigured business applications that allows users to create inter- or intra-enterprise business processes between Web-based Lawson applications and other best-of-breed applications. Mercator provides “any-to-any” data transformation and mapping between external data formats and the XML data formats utilized by Lawson e-business applications.
Pramoud Matur, VP for collaborative commerce at Lawson, said his company decided to link its product with TSI’s Mercator because they believed the relationship would lead to the development of a more efficient e-commerce solution, and generally make Lawson’s product more versatile and effective.
“After extensive competitive analysis, we selected to partner with TSI Software for e-business integration based on the unparalleled strength of Mercator in meeting our requirements for transforming XML data to and from any other data format,” Matur says. “Mercator’s ease of use dramatically reduced our time to market for the combined new product and provides rich capabilities to our [customers].”