Big Blue vies with Adobe PDF in seeking to tie back-end data to front-end forms, particularly for the vertical industries with the most need: government, health care, insurance and financial services.IBM has packaged up its
July purchase of e-forms player PureEdge Solutions Inc., announcing on Tuesday its in-house branding of PureEdge's technology as IBM Workplace Forms.
The e-forms give access to back-end data such as inventory figures, customer data and pricing information and present it in a consistent interface.
That's critical to industries such as insurance, government, banking and health care. It's also an area on which IBM competitor and partner Adobe Systems Inc. has a solid lock—and where it has plenty of ambition.
Click here to read about IBM's exploration of social networking tools.
Adobe traditionally hasn't been thought of as an enterprise software company. That has changed, however, with the rollout of the company's LiveCycle technology.
Adobe has positioned itself nicely, analysts say, in that the API hooks were already within the PDF format. Thus, Adobe workflows are already positioned to become more programmatic—a nice place to be, since government organizations including the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Defense are mandating PDFs as a display mechanism.
To play in this market, IBM already has the back end tied up. What it plans for the front end, to make Workplace Forms a player alongside PDF, is support for XForms, an emerging industry standard for electronic form documents.
Workplace Forms are based on XML, which helps to ensure customers aren't locked in as to software, operating system or computing platform choice.
IBM is targeting a number of industries with the e-forms enablement of Workplace and, eventually, its Portal offerings. For one, it's going after government agencies, which are under the strictures of new compliance regulations.
IBM is also eyeing banking and financial services. In those industries, e-forms can be used for loan and mortgage origination and automation, new account enrollment, branch automation and customer self-service. Bank customers can use e-forms for complex payments, treasury management and wire transfers.
With e-forms, insurance companies can automate policy applications, underwriting and claims using Web-based and offline forms applications.
Health care is another apt industry. E-forms can be used to replace paper forms used to create, sign, review, verify, route and approve forms to intranets or extranets. E-form technology also helps in HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance efforts.
Workplace Forms can now be ordered through IBM's ordering systems.
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