IBM Teams for ePayments Venture

Armonk, N.Y.-based International Business Machines Corp. is
teaming with a payment technologies unit of First Data Corp.
to market electronic payments solutions to the business and government
marketplaces.

IBM said the arrangement is with eONE Global LP and its subsidiaries,
SurePay and govONE Solutions. Financial arrangements were not disclosed.

The companies said that the e-payment solutions will help e-marketplace
participants, businesses, financial services providers and government
agencies save money by using online electronic transactions.

IBM will commit sales and marketing professionals to the effort and SurePay
and govONE Solutions will market the integration services provided by IBM
Global Services (IGS) Business Innovation Services (BIS) to their customers.

“Integrated payment solutions supporting e-marketplaces and government
commerce will help industries and governments make the complete
transformation to e-business,” said Mark Greene, general manager, IBM Global
Banking Industry. “Off-line manual processes introduce delays and errors, and
off-line payments can undermine the true value of business transactions…”

Also today, IBM and privately held unified business services software
provider DWL formed a strategic alliance to
deliver unified business services software for the financial services
industry. The two companies will jointly market DWL customer and industry
applications running on IBM WebSphere Application Server, with DB2 Universal
Database and WebSphere MQ family middleware, along with IBM’s eServer
hardware platform.