CorraTech Launches OPENSUITE, An Open Source Integration Project

October 15, 2007; 06:19 AM

Montclair, NJ (PRWEB) October 15, 2007 -- CorraTech, a leading, open source software services firm, announced today it has launched a new open source project, OPENSUITE™, to overcome open source application integration challenges. Enterprises today require collaboration and integration between departments and IT systems to stay competitive and improve productivity. OPENSUITE allows enterprises to increase the ROI of their open source investments by enabling business process and data integration across open source applications and proprietary IT systems. By providing a virtual suite of open source enterprise software, OPENSUITE improves user productivity, streamlines business processes and lowers IT support and maintenances costs.

The adoption and use of open source software by enterprises is widespread and continues to increase. For most organizations, integrating multiple open source applications with each other and within existing proprietary IT environments is a challenge. Although independent software vendors and community projects support integration and interoperability efforts with open source applications, most focus on providing the hooks for other applications to connect. In contrast, OPENSUITE acts as the glue required to make independently developed open source applications act as though they were designed to operate as an integrated suite.

"As leaders in open source professional services, we have spent the past three years helping companies integrate open source software into their existing IT environments," said Ron Bongo CEO of CorraTech. "During this time it has become apparent to us that in order for open source applications to deliver enterprise value, they need to operate more like a suite and more freely share business processes across the IT environment."

OPENSUITE provides packaged integration across multiple open source applications, including customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, content/document management, messaging and project management. OPENSUITE enables organizations to easily extend best practices across multiple open source or proprietary applications within OPENSUITE Core Services creating easily customized workflows. Organizations can create an integrated suite of the best open source applications for their needs, enabling them to:

• Implement cross-application business processes based on user requirements
• Enhance system usability and improve user productivity
• Preserve intra-session context while working with multiple open source applications
• Create single sign-on access for multiple applications based on user profiles
• Reduce redundancies introduced by the complexity of integration across applications

The OPENSUITE platform takes a service-oriented approach (SOA) and supplies server-to-server middleware layer functionality. The platform is distributed with a number of packaged business processes called Business Process Packs, which represent logical flows of user actions. These packs consist of reusable functions combined to create cross-application workflows that allow users to easily navigate between applications, as well as add new functions and productivity improvements to applications. With initial support for,Centric CRM, KnowledgeTree, Openbravo and Zimbra open source applications, the first Business Process Pack provides single sign-on and allows users to manage multiple workflows linking email and documents to accounts within the customer relationship management system. Users gain a tremendous amount of productivity by not having to switch from application to application and the 360 degree customer view provided by CRM is greatly enhanced.

"As the adoption of open source business software accelerates, customers are looking for process and data integration to ensure that the inherent efficiencies of open source are captured," said Daniel Chalef, COO of KnowledgeTree. "We support the OPENSUITE project's goals of achieving this cross-application integration and believe that KnowledgeTree's open architecture is an excellent fit for the project's document repository."

As founder of a new open source project, CorraTech will build, manage and support a robust, active community around OPENSUITE. As the project grows, CorraTech will continue to help develop and provide tools to simplify community collaboration. For more information and to view a demo of OPENSUITE or access the project go to www.opensuite.com.

About CorraTech
CorraTech is a leading, open source software services firm, providing open source system integration, consulting and outsourcing. As founder of the open source project OPENSUITE, CorraTech delivers integration solutions in a pluggable framework. Through OPENSUITE, businesses of all sizes can maximize their investment in multiple open source applications by extending functionality, synchronizing business processes and data, and simplifying IT maintenance. For more information about CorraTech or OPENSUITE, please visit http://www.corratech.com or http://www.opensuite.com

CorraTech's OPENSUITE project is a pluggable, services-based framework that integrates leading open source applications through business processes to improve IT performance and reduce costs.