Touchtone Announces Q1 Wintouch for WebSphere
Touchtone Joins IBM's ISV Advantage Initiative: Companies to Offer Open,
Costa Mesa, CA – January 28, 2004 – Touchtone Corporation, a leading developer of software for the IBM iSeries for over 13 years, has joined IBM’s ISV Advantage Initiative, a program designed to provide independent software vendors (ISVs) like Touchtone with technical and marketing support to help meet the specific information technology needs of small and medium businesses (SMBs).
Touchtone will release Wintouch® for IBM WebSphere in late Q1 to provide SMB customers with the next generation of integrated industry solutions based on open industry standards. The initial launch of the new product will include WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Application Server for the iSeries and Linux platforms with other IBM platforms to follow in Q2.
Enabling Wintouch eCRM on IBM’s WebSphere and WebSphere for Linux will help Touchtone expand into the SMB market faster and more effectively than is possible with proprietary platforms. With Touchtone’s nine year expertise in the iSeries CRM arena, Wintouch for WebSphere will help businesses quickly adapt to changing market demands using the power and scalability of the WebSphere platform to integrate business processes and functionality while improving customer interactions and reducing costs and complexity of ownership. Customers are seeking solutions that help them better integrate processes and applications internally and externally and allow them to quickly respond to changing market opportunities on demand.
“Through this new product launch, we see an opportunity to address SMB customers’ increasing need for lower overall IT costs and increasing flexibility,” said Rich Hall, Vice President of Sales and Marketing of Touchtone Corporation. “By leveraging the CRM and iSeries expertise in Wintouch and the proven success of IBM’s WebSphere platform, we want to provide our customers with a degree of scalability, reliability, and cost-effectiveness previously unheard of in the SMB marketplace.”
The IBM WebSphere family includes products that are designed and priced specifically for small and medium businesses – easy to install and manage, scalable to grow with your business, rich in functionality, and based on open standards to allow integration with existing software and hardware platforms.
“We are pleased that Touchtone has committed to IBM as a partner of choice by joining ISV Advantage,” said Buell Duncan, general manager, ISV & Developer Relations, IBM. “Collaborating with Touchtone will ensure that we develop open solutions that are easy to maintain and cost effective for our medium sized business customers in the industrial manufacturing and distribution industry.”
ISV Advantage is administered by PartnerWorld for Developers, the developer resource for IBM Business Partners. It is a worldwide program designed to help software developers reach broader markets, lower their costs of doing business, and take their products to market faster. For more information, visit http://www.ibm.com/partnerworld, or call
About Touchtone CorporationTouchtone Corporation, a privately held software company located in Southern California, is an IBM Premier Business Partner with over 13 years of expertise on the IBM OS/400 operating system and nine years in the CRM arena. Wintouch eCRM as a browser-based solution for the iSeries was first introduced in April 2000 at the “eCRM 2000 Conference and Exhibition.” Prior to that, Wintouch was available as a client/server application. For further information on Wintouch eCRM or Touchtone Corporation, please call
* IBM, the IBM Business Partner emblem, DB2, DB2 Universal Database, PartnerWorld and WebSphere are trademarks or registered trademarks of IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.
