For Oki Data Americas Inc. of Mount Laurel, N.J., which sells printers and computer peripherals, linking its Web site to its SAP enterprise resource planning system was essential. The company chose InterWorld's Commerce Exchange server after looking at a long list of contenders. Craig Broadbent, manager of electronic marketing at Oki Data, says InterWorld's architecture was a major factor. Broadbent says the implementation--including professional services, servers, and graphics designers--went into the six figures.

Oki Data looked at the size of InterWorld, which Gartner Group estimated to have sales for commerce software of $10 million in 1998. "It didn't change our decision," says Broadbent. "They had a good customer list and the product we wanted."

Open Market
Open Market captured about 21% of sales for commerce-server software in 1998, according to Dataquest, making it the biggest player in the market. It counts Acer, Ingram Micro, Lycos, Milacron, Siemens, Sony, and The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition among its customers.

The company's flagship product, Transact, provides end-to-end transaction services, including online customer authentication and authorization; online order and payment processing; automated tax and shipping calculations; online order tracking and status; and online customer service. Its LiveCommerce online catalog product lets companies create personalized catalogs, and its ShopSite application lets small businesses build their own Internet storefronts.

The company was founded in 1994. It had net revenue of $18.6 million for its second quarter ended June 30, a 13% increase over the year-ago quarter. Open Market reported a net loss of $1.9 million for the period, compared with a net loss of $11.1 million for the second quarter of 1998.

Lycos, the Waltham, Mass., Web community and portal, chose LiveCommerce and Transact for a new site that will integrate auctions, classified ads, and retailing into a one-stop shopping mall that provides a single checkout with verified transactions. Cory Eaves, Lycos' director of E-commerce products, says part of Open Market's appeal was the company's willingness to work on a special plan. "Straight-ahead licensing is just the default agreement," he says. "There's a world of choices."

While Open Market is tiny compared with Microsoft or IBM, that didn't phase Lycos when it was making the decision. Eaves and his team looked at some sites built using LiveCommerce. They liked the fact that the product provides the ability to deploy several different types of commerce sites. "Most sites focus on the transaction," Eaves says. "Our premise is that people really focus on the research and sharing of ideas."

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Photo by Brian Smith