Telkom Business Integration Services (TBIS) today launched its flagship e-commerce product, CyberTrade Xchange, an electronic marketplace which aims to bring together buyers and sellers in a trading community or in particular vertical industry, providing a low cost, low risk entry into e-commerce for buyers and suppliers.
"CyberTrade Xchange is one of SA`s most advanced hosted electronic Business-to-Business (B2B) trading platforms and will promote real-time, collaborative commerce in the global economy," said Telkom`s Managing Executive of Corporate and Global Markets, Randall Seidl.
"CyberTrade Xchange will give our trading partners the tools to participate in this revolutionary online, performance-driven business environment securely and reliably. We recently brought a number of our suppliers online, utilising CyberTrade Xchange to trade with Telkom," he said.
CyberTrade Xchange will streamline an organisation`s procurement and electronic sales processes by replacing the traditional paper based process with an integrated, electronic end-to-end business solution. This can significantly shorten procurement cycles, cut costs and increase productivity.
The CyberTrade Xchange trading platform provides a neutral marketplace Exchange Operating Environment (EOE) that hosts best-of-breed business applications for business-to-business trading.
Telkom is also taking CyberTrade Online Auctions to market to complement the CyberTrade Xchange product offerings. CyberTrade Online Auctions enables buyers and suppliers to shorten process-cycle times, increase contract flexibility and improve bottom line performance.
It increases sourcing capabilities and effectively liquidates inventories, by providing a service through which clients can transact using a dynamic trading mechanism as opposed to fixed-price catalogues. On a high level, the key auction applications offered are forward and reverse auctions.
"Our Centurion-based Data Centre hosts the operating environment and provides the vital security, support, maintenance and redundancy features are required to facilitate this highly sophisticated network environment. This also guarantees a minimum up-time availability of 98%," explained Telkom`s Business Integration Executive, Rikus Matthyser.
"Two of Telkom`s world-class technology providers, SAP and Commerce One, both leaders in the field of direct and indirect procurement applications, are supporting the platform.
"A joint sales and marketing agreement signed with SAP states that they will only support CyberTrade Xchange in sub-Saharan Africa. We have also aligned ourselves with other partners (such as Citigroup, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Compaq and Microsoft) to supply additional value-added services (VAS), which include a payment gateway and logistic services.
"Electronic commerce offers communications companies the opportunity to capitalise on experience in managing extensive networks, and infrastructure as well as high-level skills sets in technical support, billing, provisioning, customer service and account management. In addition, communications companies offer a credible neutral Internet platform with unsurpassed redundancy, infrastructure and reach," said Matthyser.
He added that Telkom wanted a solution for both direct and indirect procurement, and the jointly developed product from CommerceOne and SAP brought the best of two offerings into one solution.
"Coupled with this was the fact that we required interoperability between leading ERP and MarketPlace solutions to ease integration complexities. We also wanted credible long term partners that not only had a large existing market presence in the procurement and B2B world that could provide a business solution that was supported by leading edge technology, but that had the ability to continuously improve in order to support changing business requirements. We found all these and more in CommerceOne and SAP," said Matthyser.
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