Liaison Goes Multi Platform with B2B Tool

October 4, 2011 Alex Woodie

Liaison Technologies last week announced that its Electronic Commerce Server (ECS) software can now run on non-Windows platforms. The product will run on Linux and Unix operating systems–but, alas, not IBM i.

Liaison, which acquired IBM i software developer nuBridges six months ago, is a specialist in developing tools for managing, distributing, and securing data. Its ECS software distributes a variety of types of data across many different protocols and also provides managed file transfer (MFT) capabilities. When coupled with Liaison’s data translator, called Delta, the pair provides full EDI translation and enterprise application integration (EAI) capabilities.

ECS version 6.3 gives customers the choice to install the software on Linux, Unix, or Windows, which will be especially beneficial in clustered environments, Liaison says. While the software doesn’t yet run on the IBM i platform, it can move data to and from IBM i data sources, and also provides EBCDIC conversion and DB2/400 connectivity, a company spokesperson says.

Other new features in version 6.3 include support for plain vanilla FTP. The software previously supported SFTP and FTPS, but the need for good old unsecured FTP was apparently a missing link for the product.

This release also brings better integration with Contivo, Liaison’s vocabulary management solution that serves as a central repository for all of the metadata associated with integration workloads, thereby instituting a semantic “dictionary” that boosts productivity of developers working on data mapping. ECS also gains support for the Applicability Statement for Secure Health Transport, a new protocol that will be used to send and receive healthcare files securely.