February 5, 2001

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Editor: Karyl Scott (kscott@cmp.com)

Database Aggregation

Start an E-marketplace and you automatically become both a supplier and a customer of online services--a relatively new business model that's resulted from the E-commerce revolution. For instance, PartMiner Inc., which operates Free Trade Zone, an online exchange for electronic components, provides business-to-business content, technology, and procurement services that let buyers and sellers communicate more efficiently. It also delivers technology and services to other exchanges. This complex business and technology model offers significant challenges, one being the ability to provide rich connectivity among PartMiner's partners' databases and applications--something that's necessary to maintain real-time electronic transactions.

To meet those challenges, PartMiner turned to application services such as DDAccess, a data-integration offering from ExactOne Inc. DDAccess lets owners of E-commerce sites, exchanges, E-catalogs, and other data aggregators link to and make use of Internet databases across the Internet. Its Java-based applications are comprised of a proprietary HTTP server, a query engine, and a parsing engine. DDAccess should ease the custom development and integration work required to maintain hooks into multiple, disparate data sources. Under an agreement disclosed last week by ExactOne, PartMiner can distribute the technology to its exchange partners and affiliates.

Mark Schenecker, chief technology officer of PartMiner, says his company chose ExactOne partly because of the quality of the technology. "Dynamic search and procurement code is challenging to write and maintain," he says. "It's a science in and of itself." However, PartMiner is buying more than just technology. Schenecker says the legal issues involved with shopping engines and dynamic search agents are an area where his company will benefit from ExactOne's expertise.

ExactOne also provides a reporting service that lets customers monitor Web-site click-throughs, count queries and results, and monitor the costs on a per-transaction basis.

--Kristina Joukhadar (kjoukhad@cmp.com)

Illustration by Richard Borge

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