A platform for business-to-business sell-side, private exchanges and marketplaces

J. Sairamesh, R. Mohan, M. Kumar, L. Hasson, C. Bender
2002 IBM Systems Journal  
E-commerce, in terms of the monetary value of transactions, is heavily skewed toward business-to-business (B2B) commerce. Numerous B2B sites are already in existence, providing a fairly rich set of functionality for enabling simple or sophisticated trading of goods and services. In the coming years, we expect a strong growth in many kinds of B2B sites for trading, procurement, and sales. In this paper, we present a B2B platform suitable for various kinds of businesses such as large sellers,
more » ... ers, distributors, private exchanges, marketplaces, and procurement hubs. We present business scenarios, describe our design criteria, and present the architecture for the B2B platform. We discuss two major IBM offerings within the WebSphere ® Commerce Suite product-WebSphere Commerce Suite, Marketplace Edition (MPE) and WebSphere Commerce Business Edition (BE)-that are based on this platform. We also present some experiences with and deployment of MPE for private exchanges and marketplaces. Over the last few years, a tremendous number of information sites have emerged on the Internet, providing a variety of content, commerce, and collaboration services to individuals, businesses, social communities, and nonprofit organizations. Recently, driven by new business models, new kinds of commerce sites (e.g., private exchanges, e-marketplaces, and portals) have emerged on the Internet. These sites have many similarities to physical commercial marketplaces and financial markets, except that the boundaries are not restricted by physical space or proximity. Instead, the boundary limits are defined by the costs of participation, search and transaction overheads, integration overheads, computational resources, and other frictional issues. In spite of the overheads, the popularity of business-to-business (B2B) technologies is growing at a steady pace, and these technologies are being embraced by new and mature companies for efficiency in business transactions. The evidence is clear; companies completed more than $433 billion 1 of B2B commerce transactions on line (since launch) in the year 2000, and transactions are expected to have reached $900 billion in the year 2001. We are currently witnessing a trend in the formation of medium-and large-scale B2B commerce sites providing services to diverse businesses over the Internet. Some of these sites are evolving from information portals to offering more complex commerce and collaborative environments in order to enable businesses to trade goods and services efficiently. [2] [3] [4] [5] We are also witnessing an era of business transactions extending from the Internet into the intranets of businesses and connecting together the back-end "workhorses" such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, logistics servers, and supply-chain systems, thereby improving the efficiency of order-capture, management, and fulfillment, resulting in im-
doi:10.1147/sj.412.0242 fatcat:u2hknadamvhrlp5b53mqaiteo4