SilverStream Joins CivicLife on Launch

By William Welsh, Staff Writer


AUG. 7 ? CivicLife.com and SilverStream Software Inc., announced Aug. 7 they have formed a business partnership in which SilverStream will provide CivicLife with software to extend its portal-based strategy.


CivicLife of Redwood City, Calif., is a prelaunch Internet company developing a portal strategy geared to help citizens access information, execute transactions and interact with civic institutions such as federal, state and local government agencies, schools, community groups and local businesses.


SilverStream of Billerica, Mass., will provide its ePortal and xCommerce solutions to CivicLife. SilverStream's ePortal provides e-business architects with a platform to build and deploy e-portals, while xCommerce is used to automate key e-business processes. CivicLife intends to use xCommerce to link portal transactions to clients' back office systems for real-time processing and service fulfillment.


"Right from the start, we made it a priority to seek out a technology platform for our portal strategy that would be nonproprietary, standards-based and support an open, distributed component architecture," said Karl Gretton, CivicLife's senior vice president of .com Technology. "SilverStream, by far, offered the most complete product offering for the Java environment."


Gretton said that SilverStream's technology would afford CivicLife the performance and scalability "that is critical to accelerating our business objectives."


CivicLife, which was founded this year, is scheduled to launch in 2001, according to company officials. In addition to SilverStream, the Internet company also has alliances with Sun Microsystems Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., and Oracle Corp. of Redwood City, Calif.


SilverStream posted revenue of more than $23 million in 1999, according to Hoover's Online of Hoover's Inc., Austin, Texas.