Vitria Extends Ebusiness Platform Support for EDI

Sunnyvale, Calif. -- November 9, 2000 -- Vitria Technology (Nasdaq: VITR) announced today the availability of a powerful new integration solution for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). Companies can now use Vitria's leading ebusiness platform, BusinessWare®, to transparently access information and transactions managed by EDI-enabled business systems. BusinessWare's EDI solution enables customers to automate core business processes -- such as order management or inventory replenishment -- that integrate EDI systems with other internal enterprise applications, and with external EDI and XML-enabled trading partner systems, with equal ease. Vitria's new EDI solution is available immediately.

Companies can now focus on automating business-to-business processes across their entire trading partner network without having to worry about the different communication protocols and data formats that normally hamper B2B integration projects. BusinessWare converts EDI transactions to and from standard EDI formats, enabling those transactions to be shared with any other system inside or outside the firewall.

"As the enabling technology for the first generation of ebusiness, many large corporations invested hundreds of millions of dollars in EDI," said Dale Skeen, founder and CTO of Vitria. "A comprehensive ebusiness platform must enable these companies to leverage and extend this substantial investment by seamlessly integrating these EDI systems with other enterprise systems, and with the EDI and XML-enabled systems of their customers, partners, and suppliers."

Established 25 years ago, EDI is still used on a daily basis by many of the world's largest corporations, with some estimates forecasting that $3 trillion of transactions will flow through EDI systems in 2000. However, EDI's adoption has not been universal at smaller and medium-sized companies, where XML is preferred due to lower costs and greater flexibility. Now, as companies place greater emphasis on supply and demand chain automation, there is a need to manage key business processes across trading partners regardless of enabling technology. With comprehensive support for EDI and XML-based ebusiness, BusinessWare provides a one-stop shopping solution for automating supply and demand chain processes across trading partners of any size.

EDI Solution Features and Benefits

• EDI transactions become an integral part of enterprise-wide managed business processes, bringing end-to-end visibility and manageability across the supply chain.

• Lowers operating costs by transparently integrating EDI with other mission-critical enterprise applications such as ERP, CRM, and with external trading partners, without the need for expensive, application-specific point solutions.

• Lowers implementation risk and cost by leveraging BusinessWare's architecture for scalable, manageable and reliable integration using easy-to-use graphical tools that eliminate custom programming.

• Minimizes impact on existing EDI partnerships by leveraging existing VANs, offering comprehensive support for all common EDI transaction sets, and flexible tailoring of EDI transactions to meet the needs of individual partners.

• Enables EDI transactions to be easily transformed to other data formats such as XML derivatives for non-EDI based trading partner integration.

• Provides a graceful migration path for companies augmenting or replacing EDI with newer, XML-based B2B integration technologies over time, such as ebXML, BizTalk, and cXML.

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