InformationWeek

Mergers and acquisitions continue to occur at a rapid pace. Companies in the Net economy are using their stock value as currency to make acquisitions in order to show top-line growth to Wall Street. Brick-and-mortar companies in industries such as banking and insurance are consolidating faster than ever. Heavy emphasis is placed on standards compliance to ensure integration among disparate products. These common interfaces and standards let companies protect their investment and eventually provide the opportunity even to migrate to a different environment, if necessary--without excessive effort and in a reasonable time frame.

Abstraction of the application into an n-tiered model, where there is distinct separation between the data layer, the business layer, and the presentation layer, is also becoming increasingly important. However, the challenge remains to separate "vaporware" from real solutions. There remains considerable variance among vendors with respect to the degree of compliance with such object standards. It is of paramount importance to get to the second and third levels of questioning with these providers of commerce solutions in order to architect solutions effectively for the long run.

Finally, robustness and scalability are areas that all vendors claim to have addressed, but few have demonstrated. While evaluating architectures, companies should consider aspects such as load-balancing capability, connection pooling, clustering, and multiprocessing in order to determine whether the product has the ability to scale with their particular business requirements.

During the next several weeks, we'll be conducting thorough evaluations of as many as 15 E-commerce platforms to see what they offer. We'll also ask about the kinds of applications the vendors have in production and find out about their strategic direction for enhancing their products in the next year or so.

So watch this space for the analysis of our E-commerce platform evaluation this summer. With so much riding on your E-commerce strategy, you can't afford to fall behind your competitors in taking advantage of what today's products can do for your business.

Jeetu Patel is VP of research, Joe Fenner is a senior technical writer, and Lisa Matway is an analyst with Doculabs. Doculabs is an independent research and advisory firm that specializes in helping companies choose the right technologies for E-business. Vendors interested in participating in the upcoming benchmark evaluation of E-commerce platforms should contact Doculabs at 312-433-7793, www.doculabs.com, or info@doculabs.com.

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