IRVINE, Calif., April 4, 2005 (PRIMEZONE) -- IBS (Stockholm:IBSb), a world leader in distribution and supply chain solutions, and Vision Solutions, the industry standard in IBM eServer High Availability, today announced a strategic global partnership under which IBS will sell Vision's software under its own "High Availability Solutions" brand to its worldwide customer base. The partnership enables IBS to deliver proven high availability capabilities for its mission-critical distribution and supply-chain applications, thereby satisfying customers' requirements for business continuity and disaster recovery.
IBS has over 5,000 customers, many of which operate mission-critical distribution and supply chain applications which demand solutions to mitigate the impact of business disruptions and data loss due to planned and unplanned outages. In addition to the need to have high availability in place for their core applications, these customers are also faced with solving issues across complex environments involving Just-in-Time applications, customer facing web applications, and supply-chain links, all of which requires 24-7 availability.
"This strategic partnership further strengthens the IBS commitment to provide our customers with complete solutions," said Dan Wells, vice president of marketing for IBS U.S. "The combination of our world-leading Supply Chain Management solutions with Vision's ORION high availability solutions responds to specific customer requirements in providing customers with the capability to keep their mission-critical operations running efficiently and cost effectively 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."
IBS High Availability Solutions are powered by Vision's ORION software which provides the management and infrastructure to continuously replicate, monitor and manage data and non-data changes to a second iSeries server or partition. In the case of an outage, the bundled solution protects against data loss and provides the ability to seamlessly switch users and devices to the second server. Additional benefit can be realized as the secondary server can be used for other workloads such as queries and reports to improve production performance while also providing the ability for tape backups from the target to avoid user downtime for the production environment.
"High availability forms a crucial component of any mission-critical distribution and supply-chain application environment, as is evidenced by the many customers that IBS and Vision already have in common," said Ron Peeters, senior director of business development at Vision Solutions. "With this partnership now all IBS customers can protect their businesses from the impact of downtime and data loss with greatly increased confidence by sourcing these solutions directly from their application provider, IBS."
"This global partnership is a great example of our strategy to increase market and sales reach via strong partnerships," said Alan Arnold, president of Vision Solutions. "The combined solutions from IBS and Vision build a significant powerhouse between two of the worlds leading vendors on IBM's iSeries."
About Vision Solutions
Vision Solutions, headquartered in Irvine, CA, is the industry standard in eServer High Availability providing software, services and support solutions for managing a company's mission-critical applications and data. With more than 1,850 customers and 11,000 licenses around the world, the company works closely with a worldwide network of channel partners supporting virtually every industry with its world-class solutions: Visualize(tm), Vision Suite(r), ORION(tm) and ORION Integrator. Vision Solutions is an IBM Premier Business Partner and an IBM High Availability Business Partner. Vision Solutions is a member of the publicly traded IDION group of companies (JSE:IDI). For more information on Vision Solutions, please visit the company's website at www.visionsolutions.com.
About IBS
IBS AB (Stockholm:IBSb) is a leading provider of business software for supply chain management, business intelligence, financial control, and demand-driven manufacturing. IBS' primary focus is mid-sized and large wholesale distributors as well as sales and manufacturing companies in international groups, especially in pharmaceuticals, electronic parts and equipment, automotive parts and supplies, machinery, industrial supplies and consumer durables. For more information, please visit http://www.ibs.net