InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

Kimberly Finder, director of finance at AdKnowledge, says growth of the company's E-business initiatives caused it to turn to Corio for help with its applications. "Because our business is growing from the explosion of E-commerce, we needed a flexible system that could grow with us," says Finder. "Corio gave us the ability to have a scalable system without having to hire additional IT people to maintain and upgrade it or redirect the attention of our internal workers."

Even established vendors are teaming to target the lucrative applications hosting space. Oracle last week signed its first business partner for its Business OnLine service for hosting Oracle enterprise applications over the Internet. Qwest Communications International will make the service available through its CyberCenter data center locations nationwide.

Other E-services newcomers are looking to help businesses replace legacy technologies with Internet-based services. MessageQuest this week will launch e-Net, a business-to-business application-integration and outsourced E-commerce service. The service is intended to replace private and value-added networks that connect a company and its trading partners.

"Many companies have VANs in place and rather than grow the VAN traffic, they want to slowly migrate that traffic to the Internet once they're satisfied that the Internet is as resilient as it needs to be," says MessageQuest CEO Collin Osborne. Companies can also use e-Net to deploy complex, secure business-to-business applications without having to invest in development and ongoing maintenance.

Jim McDermott, senior staff telecom specialist at a large oil company, is piloting e-Net to make the distribution of oil prices to distributors more secure. Rather than fax price lists to all 2,000 distributors, a directory in the e-Net network keeps a list of all recipients and the way they prefer to receive price data. Distributors can log on to the oil company's Web site, authenticate themselves with a smart card, and access the day's fuel price, or they can choose to receive the information via E-mail, push technology to their PCs, or fax.

Which services firms really have the capability to deliver E-business services will be put to the test over the next six months, says Allie Young, an analyst at Dataquest. But one thing is certain: The demand will be there. No business wants

to be late-or even second in its industry-to deploy E-business technologies.