InformationWeek

Bell: My primary responsibility at the bank is metadata strategy, as well as support of the repository. What I've been telling people recently is that if metadata is important within a company to help you understand what you're using, what you call things, then it's going to be even more important when you're going from company to company and showing that everybody has the same definitions, that we're calling the same product the same thing. As important as it's been for intracompany experiences, it's going to be even more critical for inter-company exchanges. I see this as being a huge metadata issue.

Phillipps: With E-business, we're seeing the necessity for maturation, for Internet applications to really grow up. An emphasis we found that's critical is enterprise management--a thorough, robust, enterprise management solution that allows mission-critical applications to be successfully delivered through the network. We found it to be crucial to our strategic direction of delivering a next-generation application.

Oddly enough, it's older stuff like financial, manufacturing, and supply chains [applications] that aren't that prevalent in the current E-business suites. A move to prime-time, mission-critical E-business requires a more robust enterprise management strategy, and that's our emphasis. After months of research, we're actually developing a prototype with Computer Associates and our own staff. We must build enterprise management inside of our applications, inside of our infrastructure, as opposed to wrapping it around the outside. The common strategy is to do enterprise management outside of applications and after the infrastructure--we do it inside and before.

InformationWeek: Does enterprise management play a role for you?

F. Lecoq: Yes, it does. But E-commerce is just at the beginning of what will be a revolution. I also believe that more and more people are looking for application service provider solutions that are ready-made for them.

In other words, they want a next generation of the application, and that's what we've been trained to do for the past five years. We operate in ASP mode and we supply E-commerce portals. We cater to the needs of buyers and suppliers, to be a model, online community.

Another trend is greater integration with the existing physical business. E-commerce will become just an extension of the core activities of any organization; therefore, the integration is a very important aspect. In a way, Web activities will become just another major tool--a very effective tool, but a tool--to help people do commerce better. Through E-commerce--and, again, mostly in the ASP mode--we provide a lot of creativity.

InformationWeek: Is technology mature enough yet to make a lot of what we're talking about happen?

Phillipps: It's still growing. The nice thing about it is that the gestation period is so short nowadays that if it's not there right now, it will be in a month or so.

Bell: It may be there now. Even though the technology is new, it's a lot of older things that we're having to deal with. For so long, many companies put management systems on the back burner because they're all in-house functions. We were used to doing them ourselves; we would give them over to an IT department that would manage them. Now they're coming back to the forefront because of intercompany demands.

InformationWeek: Are you seeing internal islands in the company uniting?

Bell: Yes. Now we're exposing all of those internal systems to the customers, and it's taking on a whole new life--you have the newer technology and a lot of the older in-house functions are being opened up.