GXS has announced that it has acquired RollStream, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) leader of enterprise community management. This acquisition accelerates GXS’s strategy to speed and simplify the integration of global business communities. By combining the RollStream solution with GXS Trading Grid®, the world’s largest integration cloud, GXS expects to enhance the performance of global business and supply chain operations for its customers. The acquisition deepens GXS’s long-term commitment to the Social Supply Chain, a vision that brings together information flows and information workers to break down barriers hampering supply chain efficiency.

“Our customers realise they need a balance of people, process and technology to compete on a global scale, and they know that the human side of B2B integration matters,” said Bob Segert, CEO, GXS. “RollStream is one of the more innovative startups to enter the B2B integration market in recent years. At GXS, we are firm believers that integration belongs in the cloud and the RollStream acquisition enables us to accelerate this vision.”

The acquisition builds upon the companies’ business partnership that began in 2009 and helps accelerate the rollout of RollStream’s products across the GXS portfolio. The GXS RollStream service is available today and will be internationalised and available with local language support by first quarter 2012.

RollStream’s SaaS platform benefits global procurement teams by:

- Accelerating supplier setup by up to 60 percent, from months to weeks.

- Simplifying social exception handling and supply chain collaboration.

- Improving supplier contact accuracy with self-service updates.

- Providing a single source for sales forecasts, supplier communications, and project rollouts.

- RollStream is also known for its Web 2.0 user experience and interface, developed on the Ruby-on-Rails (“Rails”) Web development framework.

Terms of GXS’s acquisition of RollStream were not disclosed. Both companies are based in the Washington DC area.