Freight transportation software developer SMC3 and routing, mileage and mapping software developer ALK Technologies today announced the creation of a seamless interface between ALK's PC*MILER Web Services and the SMC3 RateWare XL rating product.


Under a newly formalized business alliance between the two firms, RateWare XL -- an industry benchmark that delivers less-than-truckload (LTL), density and linear rates via software-as-a-service (SaaS) -- will interface to accurate mileage data from ALK's PC*MILER product.

According to Warren Patterson, SMC3 senior vice president of product strategy and development, "This new interface gives customers a single point of access to a complete range of mileage, transit times and rate content, enabling them to conduct highly accurate shipment route planning, execution and optimization."

Added Craig Fiander, vice president of marketing for PC*MILER solutions, "This seamless interface provides customers the ability to increase the speed and efficiency of these applications as well. It ensures customers are always 'current' with automatic map data and truck-specific routing updates."

"In the past, the process of combining ALK and SMC3 content for our customers was somewhat time-consuming," said Patterson. "Now, as long as the SMC3 customer is a licensed ALK customer, SMC3 will access the mileage data they need and, based on the mileage, use our rating engine to quickly determine the rates. SMC3's investments in Web delivery -- and our understanding of how people use our data in a mission-critical operations environment -- have helped us to optimize and maximize the speed of our data delivery. Customers will get their results very quickly via our redundant, optimized network."

The new interface will also allow software developers to write one web service to SMC3, using one protocol and one very high set of security standards vs. approaching ALK and SMC3 separately, alleviating programming time and effort.

"All they need to do now is ask us a question, and we give them the answer. It's a seamless response," said Patterson.

Fiander and Patterson plan to announce the new interface and the firms' alliance at the SMC3 2011 Jump Start conference in Atlanta, Ga., January 17-19, 2011.

For more information about SMC3, visit www.smc3.com

For more information on ALK Technologies, visit www.alk.com