Feb-March 2003

If you want to integrate data from your field service team with your corporate IT system, you might be interested in a new solution using Web Services that has been launched by Telepartner Systems, the mobile business systems specialist.

Behind its new Mercury IS system lies an initiative to encourage businesses to adopt mobile technologies without fear of having to re-engineer their IT infrastructure to accommodate them. It is therefore described as a completely open platform, at least at the corporate end. Telepartner says it can integrate readily with products such as SAP's Business Connector, Oracle's JDeveloper and Siebel's Universal Application Network.

What these systems have in common is use of XML Web Services standards, which lie at the heart of Mercury IS. Web Services, with their support for J2EE (Java Enterprise Edition) and Microsoft's .Net initiative, are intended to allow discrete IT systems to access each other's code structures seamlessly, smoothing cross-application and cross-enterprise communication and visibility.

Telepartner's flagship product is its Mercury Mobile Application Server, which controls links to devices in the field. The company says implementations of this system increasingly use XML as their communication medium. Customers include ICL, Southern Water and Yorkshire Electricity.

• Northern Ireland Electricity has appointed Telepartner Systems to supply a mobile communications system for its emergency response engineers. The system will link NIE's TroubleMAN computer system via Telepartner's Mercury Server with HP iPAQ 3800 PDA devices, using the Vodafone GSM mobile phone network. The implementation follows trials with Nokia 8110 Smartphones.