InformationWeek

October 9, 2000

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E-Marketplace Vendor Widens Appeal

Consolidated Commerce upgrade improves performance and flexibility

By Alorie Gilbert

More on consolidated commerce:

Partners Offer Procurement And Logistics (8/28/00)

Internet Week: Extranetnet Apps Proceed With Caution (9/25/00)

Electronic Buyers' News: Integrated supply chain key to success (9/25/00)

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elieve it or not, Ariba Inc. and Commerce One Inc. aren't the only software vendors vying to own a major piece of the E-marketplace applications market. Among the smaller, lesser-known up-and-comers hoping to challenge the two in the space is Consolidated Commerce Inc. The company, which focuses on automating logistics, financial settlement, and fulfillment processes of E-commerce transactions, is releasing an updated version of its trading exchange product that improves the ability to customize applications and support a larger number of trans-actions.

Consolidated Commerce e-Marketplace Suite 2.1, generally available next week, houses data from an exchange in multiple, synchronized application servers, enabling customers to add more servers as their user base grows, and supports placing and accepting orders over cell phones and Palm Pilots, as well as fax and electronic data interchange.

Since the first release, the company has acquired 12 customers, mostly Internet startups attempting to build E-marketplaces from scratch. With the scalability features of the release, the company is angling to appeal to brick-and-mortar dis-tributors, logistics providers, and manufacturing companies that want to build private or public marketplaces.

But one of the first users of the 2.1 release is a small Web startup, MesoMas Ltd., a company that's building a trading exchange for the natural ingredients used in the food and beverage, cosmetics, and pharmaceutical industries. The Needham, Mass., company, which is preparing for a beta launch in December and full launch of its exchange early next year, is still in the middle of deploying the Consolidated Commerce software.

Though it has yet to see the results, MesoMas was sold on the vendor's ability to not only automate purchasing transactions, but to aggregate shipments, invoices, and purchase orders among multiple buyers and sellers. It anticipates the system will also automate the exchange of logistics documentation, such as letters of credit and advance shipment notices. That goes beyond many of the other software packages that MesoMas had evaluated.

"At an attractive price, it enables us to leapfrog and come to market very quickly with the ability to execute across the whole supply chain," says MesoMas CEO Jeffrey Rosenberg.

Pricing for Consolidated Com-merce's eMarkeplace Suite 2.1 starts at $500,000.

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