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October 23, 2000

E-Commerce Platforms
E-Commerce Platforms Mature

Business requirements are evolving beyond transaction support to include content management, personalization, integration, and marketplace enablement. Assessments of available platforms indicate that vendors are getting the message. First of two parts.

By Frank Meister, Jeetu Patel, and Joe Fenner

More on E-Commerce Applications:

PDF file: E-Commerce Platforms

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-commerce isn't just about transactions anymore. Companies increasingly are carrying out all facets of their businesses online, from customer interactions to extended supply-chain management with trading partners. And customers are demanding much more from their E-commerce platform suppliers.

A few years ago, E-commerce platforms were focused primarily on handling transactions and managing catalogs. Buying and selling over the Web was still a novel concept, and the E-commerce application providers offered limited functionality. Many platforms were designed for business-to-consumer interactions, but as that market failed to take off as expected, the platform makers began to retool to address the specific needs of business-to-business segments.

Today, businesses are demanding more than just online transaction support. They need full-fledged E-business, and that means providing a Web site that helps them build relationships with customers--be it in a business-to-business, business-to-consumer, or online marketplace model.

Based on Doculabs' recently completed evaluation of sell-side E-commerce platforms, vendors are getting the message. We performed in-depth assessments of platforms from Allaire, Art Technology Group, Blue Martini Software, BroadVision, IBM, Intershop Communications, InterWorld, Microsoft, Open Market, and SpaceWorks.

What we found was a push toward adding features or forming partnerships with third parties that can help platform vendors add content management, personalization, and enterprise integration to their commerce platforms. In addition, these systems are evolving to enable suppliers to work with online marketplaces. This means supporting a many-to-many style of collaboration, transactions, and workflow.

In this article, we take a look at how the vendors compare in these areas. In next week's issue, we'll review each product individually.

The evolving E-commerce platforms are making it easier for business users to play a role in developing and owning applications. This isn't to say that the products are already highly evolved in these areas. On the contrary, most of the vendors know what they need to do, but they have a significant amount of work ahead of them in order to effectively deliver on their plans.

Content management is a key requirement for any E-business initiative. Content management is an application service that gives companies flexibility in controlling the information that users access. It enables businesses to better target, acquire, and retain customers, and it fosters customer loyalty through presentation of valuable, dynamic content.

An effective E-commerce platform needs to be able to manage all of the content that may be presented to users as part of the application. This includes file assets such as documents, pages, graphics, text, and even business content such as contracts and invoices.

Content can be provided by users in the form of feedback about services or reviews of products. Content can also include catalog content such as stock-keeping units, product descriptions, and prices.

While commerce platforms should support existing product catalogs from legacy or enterprise resource planning systems if available, not every commerce application will rely on an existing catalog. Therefore, the commerce platform should provide a catalog with sophisticated product-management capabilities.

The current leaders in this area are BroadVision and Open Market. BroadVision recently acquired document management and Extensible Markup Language vendor Interleaf and is integrating that company's capabilities into its already-strong content-management capabilities.