E-Commerce Players Partner

<B> E-Commerce Players Partner</B>

By Mary Ann McNulty

Leading players in electronic travel this month aligned with payment vendors, network operators and integrators in a flurry of announcements designed to speed adoption of the technology.

In the biggest series of alliances, Commerce One will team with 38 companies and build a new open software platform to allow companies to build their own electronic marketplace. For those seeking a payment vehicle integrated with procurement software, Commerce One aligned with American Express and GE Capital Corporate Expense Management Services. As yet, most procurement software has no built-in payment means. Early adopters are using electronic data interchange, developing interfaces to their accounts payable systems or even writing checks to pay for products purchased online.

In talking to procurement card customers over the past two years, American Express and GE Capital found the needs to be as diverse as the clients, ranging from simple online ordering to full-featured offerings with authorization and workflow. As these needs emerge, GE Capital expects to sign similar alliances with other procurement software vendors, said vice president of new product development Craig Watson.

Meanwhile, Visa announced plans to integrate its card offerings with SAP, and American Express announced relationships with Ariba and Concur Technologies Inc.'s CompanyStore procurement application.

More announcements are expected from Amex as customers identify other vendors with which they would like to work, said Brigitte Baumann, general manager and senior vice president of Amex's Corporate Services Interactive. Companies are just now starting to seek ways to streamline the front end of their purchasing, but she expects more than 100 to implement by year-end.

Commerce One now has more than 20 enterprise customers, while Ariba reports 30.

"The combination of American Express and Ariba delivers a complete solution from requisition to payment," said Joseph Postiglione, director of global procurement information management at Bristol-Myers Squibb, one of several joint customers asking for the relationship. "The solution will enable Bristol-Myers Squibb to not only gain process efficiencies through automating our procurement, but also gain significant savings by automating our payments."

The rush by procurement vendors to plug the missing links in their systems is due both to customer demand and to the impending entre&eacute; of enterprise resource management systems such as Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP into this arena.

GartnerGroup's Dataquest, based in San Jose, projected that worldwide expenditures for procurement software will rise from $95 million this year to $470 million by 2003. Last fall, Gartner called the applications "immature" and forecast a battle between IBM and Microsoft for EC platform dominance. The study called Ariba, Commerce One and Netscape the most established players in the "buy-side business-to-business EC software market."

Commerce One, headquartered in Walnut Creek, Calif., has announced plans for a MarketSite Open Marketplace Platform and MarketSite.net, a business-to-business portal that will interoperate with its BuySite electronic procurement application and other applications. Commerce One also will collaborate with U.K.-based British Telecom and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. in Japan; with system integrators MCI Systemhouse, Pricewaterhouse Coopers and Cambridge Technology Partners; and with suppliers W.W. Grainger and Graybar, among others.

"The electronic procurement market has gone through several generations and today's announcement marks the beginning of its next generation," said Jay Tenenbaum, vice president and chief scientist at Commerce One and former chairman of Veo Systems, which pioneered the XML-based commerce that MarketSite is using. "The first generation systems focused on automating catalogs within the buying organization and the second generation rushed to link buying and supplying organizations together in a shared environment with real-time capabilities. Now, we are witnessing the third generation, namely, the ability to create open, dynamic highly scalable marketplaces that offer unprecedented benefits to the entire trading community."

Commerce One also has aligned with UPS for transportation, TanData for information services and TaxWare for tax services.