IBM Net.Commerce Pro 3.2 gives large companies more sophisticated commerce features and the ability to integrate into existing core business systems. It has Advanced Catalog Tools to create shopping advisers, intelligent search methods to assist with product selection and purchasing, and tools that facilitate back-end integration with legacy software. Both products can operate on the IBM AIX, S/390, AS/400, Windows NT, and Sun Solaris platforms.

IBM's commerce-sever products support industry standards, including Open Buying on the Internet, Extensible Markup Language, and the Open Trading Protocol. IBM, of course, has a global services operation and financial muscle only a few technology companies can match. After struggling in the early 1990s, the company has been outperforming most smaller competitors for the past two years, largely because of its focus on E-business. Revenue for the period ended June 30 was $21.91 billion, up 16% from the second quarter of 1998. Net income rose 60% to $2.39 billion, including gains from the sale of IBM's Global Network.

Microsoft
Microsoft Site Server Commerce Edition, a commerce server optimized for Windows NT Server, provides a comprehensive set of tools, server components, and features for setting up a site, managing online promotions, changing product mixes in real time with a Web browser, creating Web catalog pages, managing user profiles, and analyzing usage trends. The company plans to introduce a BizTalk Server next year, which will be based on XML.

SmarterKids.com Inc., a children's educational product retailer in Needham, Mass., began creating a Web site in April 1998 with the aim of selling on the Internet by the Christmas season. A big reason it chose Microsoft's commerce server was that it had a team of developers who knew Windows NT applications. The company also found the price attractive and liked the fact that many independent software companies are developing tools and applications for Site Server.

Using Fry Multimedia to help develop the Web front end and in-house engineers to develop the back end, SmarterKids.com met its goal. The site gets more than 1 million hits per month, according to Richard Secor, the company's CIO and VP of IS. He says revisions to the site are so easy that SmarterKids.com has taken over the development process for a new site that will support 20,000 concurrent users.

Microsoft has been beefing up its E-commerce offerings and is developing strategic partnerships with a variety of companies so that it can offer a complete line of products and services. Sales of the company's commerce-server offerings jumped 187% to $8 million in 1998, according to Dataquest, giving it about 6% of the fractured market.

One advantage to buying a commerce server from Microsoft is you don't have to worry about the company going out of business any time soon. Microsoft has an equity market capitalization of more than $500 billion and represents more than 4% of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index. In the latest quarter, revenue rose 39% year over year to $5.8 billion. Net income soared 55% to $2.1 billion.

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