The purchase is an early skirmish in the looming war between Adobe, Microsoft and Big Blue when it comes to controlling the e-forms market—a hungry market fueled by federal mandate and compliance efforts.IBM on Tuesday announced it is snapping up PureEdge Solutions Inc., a developer of electronic forms that hook into back-end data and applications in order to present them to users in standardized, customizable templates.
As a partner, PureEdge is already tightly integrated with IBM technologies. Its XML forms are integrated with IBM's Content Manager, WebSphere Portal, Lotus, DB2 and Portal product lines.
Linked together, PureEdge and IBM business process automation tools enable the management of data through life cycles of business processes.
Ambuj Goyal, general manager of Workplace, Portal and Collaboration for IBM's Software Group, said in a conference call with reporters and analysts that the acquisition is destined to spread the e-forms technology across the product lines. To do that, IBM needs to have the technology in-house rather than in a partnering scenario, he said.
IBM also seeks to push forward the adoption of the XForms standard, a standard that describes what the form does and how it looks, thus allowing flexible presentation options, including classic XHTML forms, to be attached to an XML form definition.
"What's happening now, [forms such as those having to do with warranty management and insurance] are being captured in the currency of exchange across business processes," Goyal said.
"They get captured in one technology and can't be shared in another. [XForms] is a standard we want to propagate into the marketplace. Customers will benefit if they don't get locked into a proprietary technology."
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: It's On: IBM Takes on Adobe, Microsoft with E-Forms
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