As a result of the relationship, multi-national companies in these industries, as well as those in the company's traditional targets of manufacturing, banking, telecommunications and life sciences may realize greater information technology (IT) efficiencies and business results through seamless collaboration among business communities, processes, people and technology.

One customer who has benefitted from this relationship is Lifetouch, the largest employee-owned photography company in the world. According to Jay Drayton, senior director of Information Systems and Applications at Lifetouch National School Studios, "Lifetouch has undertaken a broad initiative to enhance its ability to better understand its customers. The company has implemented Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Suite to get a single view of its customers on the selling side and a single view of order pipelines, inventory of images and lab capacity on the fulfillment side, leveraging Infosys consultants on the implementation. Together, Sterling Commerce and Infosys delivered the domain expertise in retail and manufacturing we needed to create a world-class solution. We were able to implement this 'game-changing' software while still maintaining our high customer service levels."

The new global partnership expands a relationship between the two companies that has existed for more than a decade. Sterling Commerce and Infosys have transformed its customers' business processes in order to improve flexibility and effectiveness. Infosys' large-scale implementation expertise and world-class global delivery capabilities have led to highly successful Sterling Commerce solution implementations. Sterling Commerce provides solutions for enterprise integration, multi-enterprise integration, payments management, selling, and fulfillment that help companies achieve higher levels of performance by optimizing their business communities, processes, and technologies.

According to the January 2008 report by Forrester, "Which Service Provider Is Right For Your Supply Chain Project?" Forrester stated, "Of all the offshore providers, Infosys Technologies provides the greatest breadth of operational outsourcing capabilities to complement its IT services. Infosys complements SCM consulting with outsourcing services." [Source: Which Service Provider Is Right for Your Supply Chain Project? Author - Patrick Connaughton, January 23, 2008]

"Sterling Commerce is delivering world-class solutions to help companies innovate in global commerce, and this streamlined relationship with Infosys delivers enhanced capacity to meet the demands of global, multi-national companies," said Joel Reed, senior vice president of Corporate Marketing and Strategic Alliances at Sterling Commerce. "Our solutions also enhance key Infosys frameworks to solve industry challenges for global companies across all key sectors including the retail, manufacturing and banking industries."

"This extension of our successful relationship comes at a time when clients are looking for companies to work together to deliver the value they need out of their existing systems. With the largest number of consultants trained on Sterling Commerce technology in the field, Infosys is already providing deep domain and industry expertise to Sterling Commerce customers," said C. Kakal, senior vice president of enterprise solutions at Infosys Technologies. "For this reason, our work with Sterling Commerce has been growing at nearly 23 percent annually over the past five years and is a key contributor in enabling Infosys to expand its presence in the e-commerce and supply chain management markets."