Inovis Gains SAP Certification for EDI Software

June 24, 2008 Alex Woodie

The TrustedLink EDI offerings from Inovis have been re-certified to work with SAP ERP applications and its NetWeaver middleware framework, the Atlanta, Georgia, company announced last week.

Inovis has a long but winding claim to the IBM AS/400 (now Power Systems) marketplace for EDI software. About 20 years ago, a company by the name of Premenos started developing EDI translators for OS/400. Premenos was acquired by Harbinger in 1997 for $200 million; Harbinger was acquired by Peregrine Systems for the eye-popping sum of $2 billion in June 2000; and, following the accounting scandal at Peregrine and the resulting implosion, three venture capital groups–Golden Gate Capital, Parallax Capital Partners, and Cerberus Capital Management–swooped in to scoop up the remaining EDI bits for the low low cost of $35 million, and created a new company called Inovis to sell it.

Today, Inovis is still considered one of the dominant players for EDI translators for i5/OS (now i), the products that sit as mediators between proprietary ERP systems and their particular way of managing purchase orders and invoices, and the standards-based protocols (AS2, ASNSI X12, EDIFACT) that everybody uses to communicate orders and coordinate shipments across private VAN lines and–increasingly with AS2–the Internet.

With SAP continuing its dominance of the ERP application market, it was instrumental for Inovis to continue to work with this very important player, and to support the SAP CA-EDI interface. To that end, the company announced last week that its TrustedLink products have been granted “Certified for SAP NetWeaver” status by the German ERP software giant, ensuring TrustedLink customers continued support for SAP ERP software.

The certification is valid for three TrustedLink products: TrustedLink System i version 6.2; TrustedLink Enterprise version 6.1, which runs on Unix and Windows 2000 servers; and the general purpose TrustedLink 6.1 EDI Interface.

Inovis CTO Steve Cochran says the integration will help across small, mid size, and large companies. “The recertification of our TrustedLink solutions is further validation of our commitment to integrating our solutions with SAP applications and delivering a broader, strategic adapter roadmap for integration with a growing number of back-office applications,” he says.