IBM Solutions Partners

StreamServe is a leader in the fast-growing Enterprise Business Communication market. StreamServe's pioneering approach to business communication can help your company solve one of the biggest problems it faces today: the high cost and complexity of exchanging information with customers, suppliers and employees.

This cost and complexity is generated by the huge variety of enterprise applications, legacy systems, communication formats and channels at work across your 'extended enterprise'. StreamServe's vision and unique solution is to abstract this cost & complexity away from the underlying IT that generates it, and into a single communications layer - the StreamServe Business Communication Platform.

a) The range of technologies and requirements is a serious barrier to effective trade - especially when application integration is such a slow and expensive process.

b) About 95% of all business communication still takes place on paper: it's expensive and time-consuming for your company, and for the people you do business with.

c) You can see the benefit of new communication channels, like mobile and the Internet, but you're constrained by the capabilities of your existing IT - not to mention the requirements of your customers and suppliers.

By decoupling your business communication processes from your IT in this way, and by ensuring the platform can process and convert the widest possible range of formats and channels, StreamServe gives your company the flexibility to connect with customers, suppliers and employees in almost any way you need to - while reducing cost and complexity.

StreamServe Business Communication Platform acts like an 'intelligent hub' enabling organisations like yours to produce and exchange critical documents independent of source data, format or channel. Your organisation can cut costs and embrace enterprisewide efficiency savings. It allows you to manage how you communicate with customers, business partners and employees.

IBM/StreamServe Universal Document Services (an extension of StreamServe Business Communication Platform jointly developed with IBM)

The goal of Universal Document Services (UDS) is to offer end-to-end support for business document flows inside and outside the organisation. It is based on the fact that documents drive business. Whether in the form of a contract or a purchase order, the document is the primary facility of automatic business communication and serves to integrate one company's process with that of its suppliers.

The Universal Document Services framework was designed with one thought in mind. Rather than limit the customer's back end application to hard-wired, service intensive integration, Universal Document Services provides flexibility and scalability, which mirrors the way real world businesses exchange business documents.

UDS offers superior business value on several levels.

1. By focusing on the document and process, it offers a level of abstraction apart from the back end system. This is important for two reasons. First, necessary business documents supporting business processes are likely to originate in different applications. Universal Document Services can coordinate the various documents from heterogeneous applications. It also helps companies focus on business processes and content, not technology. It gives companies freedom from being locked into one vendor or proprietary communication protocols.
2. UDS prepares organizations for the pending challenges of business communication. By deploying UDS, a company can be more agile, move gradually to support new standards like XML and web services, and respond to future IT modifications needed by their business.
3. Part of the elegance of the UDS solution is that it offers a gradual adoption path. Companies can start with personalised document management or email and as their customer or suppliers' needs change they can easily implement more advanced aspects of the solution, such as XML. Also, UDS addresses the need of organisations to continue support for paper and legacy electronic formats. It provides for current and future processes.
4. UDS is document centric - this helps the enterprise become less sensitive to new technology developments or changes in business processes
5. UDS supports the entire business process. Most business documents require an action and reaction, for example a purchase order and purchase order acknowledgment. UDS can publish the outbound document and manage the inbound document - it supports the end-to-end business process.
6. Finally, UDS helps companies squeeze more return on investment out of their existing back end application. ERP and other enterprise applications were not initially designed to function outside of the enterprise. Rather than spend valuable time and resource on custom coding, UDS extends the native capabilities of your company's back end systems outside the four walls of the organisation. UDS is the first truly comprehensive communication framework, which offers an entirely new approach to information exchange between companies, employees, and suppliers.

Electronic and printed documents, such as invoices, statements of account, delivery notes and reports are the lifeblood of any business, as well as one of its greatest cost burdens, yet integration approaches have failed to optimise document creation processes. What you really need is a cost-effective and efficient way of exchanging electronic and printed information without technical or communication barriers.

Product Features or Benefit Statements :

1. Reduce the cost and complexity of business communication
2. Replace paper-based communication with electronic formats - without changing your applications system
3. Reduce labour and materials cost by automating business document processes