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Network World,
09/11/00
E-marketplaces
E-marketplaces -- we see announcements galore, but little is said in them about their technology infrastructures. Should we be concerned?
McClimans: It depends on what the marketplace is trying to do and how big it is.
Gibbs: Look at the companies that are building their own business-to-business portals, they've got some really good software, some outstanding systems. For example, Viador has what it calls the E-Portal Framework, a general-purpose architecture for building portals with Portal Customization APIs and something horribly named Portlets - makes me think of cutlets. It claims Hewlett-Packard, Lucent, Nortel Networks, Sprint and Xerox among its clients. So it's one example of a company with a good, solid piece of software that, as far as I can determine, is being adopted. And the courtier of the companies picking it up know how to build an infrastructure and take advantage of this kind of product.
E-marketplaces are very much as good as you are willing to make them. The infrastructure is there, the context is there and the opportunity is there.
What about IT involvement in the e-marketplace decision?
Gibbs: You've got to distinguish companies that have been doing e-business for a long time. Acxiom Corp., for example, has had its own private interchange portal for clients since before the Web. Now Acxiom is doing the portal in a more generalized way. That's really the transition we've seen - that business-to-business is getting more structure.
I really like XML portal server, XPS, from Sequoia Software. Microsoft is excited about it and Sabre and Biztravel.com have bought into it. It's an XML-based application integration platform with transaction management, load balancing, centralized management console, workflow and spider capability. These products typically cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but you compare it to top-end CRM or any of those enterprise apps and it's a drop in the vast ocean of expenditure.
Kearns: It's nothing that the IT department couldn't do, if it had more resources than it does today. You're talking about coupling a fairly robust relational database management system with a very good directory service and putting a Web front-end on it.
McClimans: In fact, it sounds like a real good candidate for ASP outsourcing.
Gibbs: There are a number of ASPs that offer B2B marketplaces, some of which are pretty good - look at Chemdex. But the most creative use will be by megacompanies that hold and control a market. They'll integrate their entire dealer network or reseller networks, or whatever, through a B2B portal.
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