Sterling Commerce has introduced a new solution, Visibility Manager as its first supply chain application available within its newly architected business process network, the Sterling Collaboration Network.

Visibility Manager represents the further blending of Sterling's business integration technology with supply chain management technology from Yantra Corporation which Sterling acquired in February 2005.

Built on Sterling's Multi-Enterprise Services Architecture (MESA), the Sterling Collaboration Network can host both integration services as well as applications, e.g., order management, supply chain execution, store operations and many others. Unlike major competitors, there is no migration necessary for Sterling customers to take advantage of this unified architecture, making the delivery of new capabilities seamless.

According to Gartner Research Director Benoit Lheureux, "The result of the emerging hybrid of integration and application services is a form of business process fusion that can be applied to the B2B context. Collectively, integration and application service providers are converging their capabilities to form a new market segment --- 'business process networks' --- that offers domain- or industry-specific B2B process integration services."

Visibility Manager provides document and process visibility into business transactions as they are traded among partners of all sizes. It offers a view into supply chain activity with a single interface that lets customers control all steps in a order-to-invoice business process, as a single the ongoing business transaction. With this control, organizations are able to be more responsive and profitable in their collaboration with business partners of all kinds.