CorraTech, it has launched a new open source project, OPENSUITE, to overcome open source application integration challenges. Enterprises today require collaboration and integration between departments and IT systems to stay competitive and improve productivity. As founder of a new open source project, CorraTech will build, manage and support a robust, active community around OPENSUITE.

    OPENSUITE allows enterprises to increase the ROI of their open source investments by enabling business process and data integration across open source applications and proprietary IT systems. By providing a virtual suite of open source enterprise software, OPENSUITE improves user productivity, streamlines business processes and lowers IT support and maintenances costs.

    The adoption and use of open source software by enterprises is widespread and continues to increase. For most organizations, integrating multiple open source applications with each other and within existing proprietary IT environments is a challenge. Although independent software vendors and community projects support integration and interoperability efforts with open source applications, most focus on providing the hooks for other applications to connect. In contrast, OPENSUITE acts as the glue required to make independently developed open source applications act as though they were designed to operate as an integrated suite.

    "As leaders in open source professional services, we have spent the past three years helping companies integrate open source software into their existing IT environments," said Ron Bongo CEO of CorraTech. "During this time it has become apparent to us that in order for open source applications to deliver enterprise value, they need to operate more like a suite and more freely share business processes across the IT environment."

    Terry Barbounis, CTO of The First Church of Christ, Scientist and The Christian Science Monitor commented: "Every organization is faced with integration challenges. We're always looking for innovative solutions that can drive differentiation into our businesses, which often leads us to best-of-breed point solutions. I believe OPENSUITE can help organizations tie these solutions together."

    With initial support for,Centric CRM, KnowledgeTree, Openbravo and Zimbra open source applications, the first Business Process Pack provides single sign-on and allows users to manage multiple workflows linking email and documents to accounts within the customer relationship management system. Users gain a tremendous amount of productivity by not having to switch from application to application and the 360 degree customer view provided by CRM is greatly enhanced.

    OPENSUITE enables organizations to easily extend best practices across multiple open source or proprietary applications within OPENSUITE Core Services creating easily customized workflows. Organizations can create an integrated suite of the best open source applications for their needs, enabling them to:
    - Implement cross-application business processes based on user requirements
    - Enhance system usability and improve user productivity
    - Preserve intra-session context while working with multiple open source applications
    - Create single sign-on access for multiple applications based on user profiles
    - Reduce redundancies introduced by the complexity of integration across applications