InformationWeek

November 10, 1997

Actra To Help Purchasing

Companies explore OBI Web protocol

ompanies using new products from Actra Business Systems are exploring ways to improve their purchasing systems with Open Buying on the Internet (OBI), an emerging protocol for completing large transactions via the World Wide Web in real time.

Actra last month announced the availability of BuyerXpert, a member of the CommerceXpert line of electronic-commerce products for Sun Solaris systems. Actra, a joint venture of Netscape Communications and GE Information Services, claims CommerceXpert is the first software to support both the fledgling OBI and the prevailing EDI over the Internet (EDIINT).

By supporting both, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company aims to offer purchasing departments more flexibility by letting them go directly to the catalog Web sites of suppliers and place orders using either technology.

"People enabled with Actra have a much broader opportunity for system-to-system communication," says David Alschuler, an analyst at the Aberdeen Group, a research firm in Boston. "It is the first broadly integrated family we have seen," he says, adding that Commerce One in Walnut Creek, Calif., is working on similar integration.

Sold On Dual Capability
OBI capability was one factor that sold Kinko's Inc. on BuyerXpert for use on its extranet, says Tom Haythorne, director of development at the Ventura, Calif., copy-center and office-services chain. Kinko's, he says, has "a number of initiatives moving toward OBI" that will help facilitate purchasing from 15 vendors via its extranet. Haythorne says Kinko's extranet will soon handle about 50,000 transactions a month.

The combination of OBI, which is being promoted by American Express and is backed by other large companies, and EDI also went over well at Shell Services Co., says Charles Tsang, manager of electronic commerce at the Houston unit of Shell Oil. "We've identified many benefits of OBI, one of which is to act as a catalog aggregator," he says. Shell, for example, could take the catalogs from various suppliers and compile them into one master catalog that's placed on its own intranet, making life easier for its purchasing and IT departments.

That service is already provided by companies such as Acquion of Greenville, S.C., and other data aggregators that compile disparate information and present it in a coherent format for companies to use on their intranets. Acquion is not yet doing anything with OBI, but a spokesman says it probably will when customers want to go outside the firewall and search out products on the public Internet.

"The real question is, Are we going to have a standard or work with aggregators?" says Todd Wood, a global practice leader in Atlanta for Internet commerce at consulting firm Deloitte & Touche LLP. "Standards are great if they emerge, and OBI has a chance of being that."

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