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March 27, 2000

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e will begin putting many of these vendors to the test next month to see how well each suite or service lets companies create and manage Web-based commerce applications--whether through packaged software or through an application service provider hosting model. The study provides an opportunity for E-commerce vendors to show how they address specific application types and customer demands--either independently or in collaboration with other vendors.

This qualitative evaluation will be conducted by a team of analysts from Doculabs as well as editors from InformationWeek Labs. For the evaluation scenario, we have created specifications for a business-to-business E-commerce application that enables a distributor to conduct trade with multiple retailers over the Web.

In this model, the distributor maintains its own inventory database, which includes a large number of products, as well as pending orders, historical orders, catalog details, membership data, etc. This application scenario provides a mechanism for us to exercise the features of each product, to evaluate the comprehensiveness of each product, and to assess the overall application development process using each product.

Each vendor will develop much of this application on its own according to our specifications. With the bulk of the test application built, each vendor will spend two days at Doculabs' facility in Chicago, briefing us on their strategy and product, and working with our team of analysts as they use the product to build portions of a real-world application scenario.

We have identified specific requirements and criteria that we will evaluate through our assessment process. The bulk of these criteria break down into functional areas:

Hosting (for ASP functionality, if supported)

We'll also evaluate the tools for building the application and architectural issues: scalability, pooling, load balancing, fault tolerance, state and session management, platform support, and integration capabilities.

The hands-on qualitative evaluations will be conducted during April. The summary results will appear in a series of articles to be published in InformationWeek this summer.

Return to main story, "New Platform Options Fuel E-Commerce."

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