InformationWeek

Visitors to the site can search for vendors through the Solution Showcase, browse optimization applications, participate in forums, and read technical and more general articles on optimization topics.

But what e-Optimization.com's backers would really like to see on the Web site are case studies. That's because "case studies are where theory meets reality," says Bill Scull, Ilog Inc.'s VP of marketing. By reading a case study, prospective optimization users can quickly get a sense of whether optimization is the right technology for them.

Bob Ferrari, a senior research analyst with AMR Research, hopes that e-Optimization.com will "provide one-stop shopping for users who are very interested in optimization technology."

Already, e-Optimization.com has recruited a number of big-name players in the optimization market to contribute case studies and resources for display on the site. Some of these companies include Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP.

Members of the optimization community are certainly rooting for the site. To date, if you've wanted to gather optimization-related information, you've only had a handful of sources to choose from, says Jin Yang, a product development manager at PeopleSoft.

These sources have included the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences' Web site at www.informs.org and mat.gsia.cmu.edu, a site put together by Michael Trick, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Graduate School of Industrial Administration.

Where e-Optimization.com comes in, Yang says, is in helping coordinate all this information into a single place where people can start their optimization research.

More to the point, most optimization resources are aimed at academic, rather than business, users. "You need a decoder ring to understand most of the optimization resources out there," says Christelle Colin, Ilog's Web community manager.

But whether the e-Optimization.com site proves popular remains to be seen, says AMR's Ferrari. "This site promises to be something innovative," he says, "but we'll have to wait and see how the community reacts to it."