InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

Later this year, iPlanet intends to offer the iPlanet Market Maker platform as the cornerstone of its Open Digital Marketplaces strategy and to speed its push into the business-to-business marketplace arena. The software suite will provide modules written in Java and will tie into iPlanet's CommerceXpert E-commerce applications, including BuyerXpert, SellerXpert, Biller-Xpert, ECXpert, and TradingXpert.

QuoteMed.com Inc., a marketplace for the medical community scheduled to launch next month, uses CommerceXpert apps and plans to test the new platform. "We think it's going to allow us to go directly into the hospitals' legacy systems without any interfacing," says Jan Kaputkin, president and CEO. "It will be critical. It's going to cut down on our startup and implementation time."

The platform will not be generally available until fall, and analysts say iPlanet is attempting to compete with IBM's WebSphere. Simon Yates, an analyst with Forrester Research, says both product lines are similar and have the potential for growth.

"All of these marketplaces are built on a shaky software infrastructure. They're all homegrown applications, and they can't scale," Yates says.

"What these marketplaces need is a consistent, scalable platform to build these things that is readily integratable with the other companies that want to join it. Both IBM and iPlanet are providing that."