Open Applications Group Embraces Mid-Market Requirements for Business Network Integration Standards

OAGi Working Group to build business process based profiles for Mid-market use.

Marietta, GA (PRWEB) October 29, 2007 -- Today the Open Applications Group, Inc. (www.oagi.org) announced that by a unanimous vote, the OAGi Policy Board has approved the formation of a new Working Group focused on the needs of the Mid-Market. Unlike large enterprises, many mid-sized firms can't afford the cost in time or effort to invest in the infrastructure needed for full scale solutions, but at the same time they often need the functionality of large enterprises.

The Mid-market Working Group intends to address the need to enable more open standards based "out-of-the-box" plug and play types of solutions. It will initially address the Order-to-Cash process with an expectation to eventually establish a follow on chartered Work Group to expand into other mid-market business process domains.

The primary expected deliverable of this Working Group will facilitate simple and fast business connectivity for mid market integration through mid market interoperable profiles of the current OAGIS business messages.

"We believe the results from this Mid-market Working Group will enable our customers to quickly and easily conduct business by relying on the OAGIS open standards," said Ralph Hertlein, executive member of the OAGi Policy Board and IBM representative. "It will also empower them to connect to larger OAGIS enabled Enterprises, greatly enhancing business processes across entire chains. And it meshes very well with IBM's commitment to open standards for better results."

The founding members of this Working Group include Intuit, Lawson, Manhattan Associates, INFOR, Acctrak21, IBM, Oracle, and SAP with Pramod Mathur from Lawson leading the group.

"We are very excited about the formation of this Working Group," said David Connelly, CEO of the Open Applications Group. "Profiling standards to enable their use for specific targeted constituencies is emerging as a best practice and I am pleased our membership is driving this for our mid-market users of OAGIS."

About the Open Applications Group
The Open Applications Group is an open, not-for-profit and fully independent standards development organization focused on business process interoperability across entire industries and value chains as well as within enterprise business processes.

The OAGIS XML solution is the only open solution architected to support businesses' process integration needs across the entire chain as well as within the enterprise. OAGIS is based on a rich, extensible set of reusable components for business process and communication. It is the most mature, extensible XML Schema-based industry standard in use today within and across multiple industries. It is available without royalty or licensing fees.

OAGi information and its OAGIS standard are available at www.oagi.org.

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