The Internet speed at which two leading e-Business vendors, SAP and Commerce One, have launched comprehensive, unified Internet Age solutions is impressing global analysts.
With all the hype surrounding the New Economy, tangible solutions are too few. Many vendors have made extravagant promises that have yet to be fulfilled.
Living up to their alliance commitments, Commerce One and SAP have announced immediate availability of their jointly developed next-generation e-business offering. It combines Commerce One's leading e-marketplace infrastructure with e-procurement, supply chain, product planning and analysis applications from SAP.
Commerce One is the leader in global e-commerce solutions for business, while SAP is the leading provider of inter-enterprise software solutions.
"The new solutions, MarketSet and EnterpriseBuyer, meet the June 2000 commitment to the market," says Simon Carpenter, general manager at SAP Africa responsible for the mySAP.com Internet components.
"The SAP and Commerce One 'dream team' has now delivered its first joint solution of next generation e-business software," says Carpenter. "The result is a joint e-marketplace and e-procurement solution of unparalleled scope and depth that enables our customers to work together as one."
These e-marketplace customers include the Metals and Mining procurement marketplace, created by 16 companies in a $200 billion procurement market. Two well-known South African companies, De Beers and Anglo American, are in this marketplace, illustrating the global nature of collaboration in the New Economy. Both the Mining marketplace and Enporion, an open, global exchange for the energy industry founded by five North American power utilities, are expected to go live with the joint solution in 2000.
"Being able to ship an architecturally unified product within several months of conception is truly impressive, says Josh Greenbaum, principal analyst with Enterprise Applications Consulting of Berkeley, California. "With this development, the partnership ...has moved from theory to reality."
Carpenter stresses that while much of the activity around the Internet is centred in the first world economies, SAP Africa and Commerce One have already begun working closely together to address South African requirements and to ensure that local customers are able to participate effectively in the global economy
MarketSet is the first comprehensive e-marketplace solution suite available in the market that includes collaborative supply chain capabilities and business process analytics.
"Its architecture ensures that the e-marketplace is open to virtually any buying, selling and enterprise application on-ramp, marketplace-to-marketplace transactions and easy deployment of value-added capabilities and services, such as auctions, multiple payment methods, content sourcing, services and logistics," explains Carpenter.
MarketSet Platform provides the infrastructure on which an e-marketplace is created and deployed. It is designed to transform linear, serial supply chains to parallel, collaborative communities, eliminating tier-to-tier confusion and dramatically reducing order-to-delivery cycle times, improving customer relationships and increasing productivity for businesses worldwide.
"The other announced offering, EnterpriseBuyer, is the first suite of e-procurement solutions that goes beyond simple catalogue ordering," explains Carpenter.
The solution comes in two deployment options: professional and desktop. The professional edition enables the dynamic procurement of both direct and indirect goods, automating and integrating with the full range of business processes required for buying complex products, parts and supplies, including bill of materials, materials management, contract buying, configured goods buying, warehousing and business intelligence.
In this way, the EnterpriseBuyer professional edition further enables coordinated procurement management throughout all facets of the supply chain. The desktop edition provides users with a business-wide self-service Web solution for catalogue buying of indirect goods and basic procurement activities.
Commerce One is one of the business partners joining SAP at SAPPHIRE 2000 South Africa, running concurrently with Comdex 2000 at Gallagher Estate from 3 - 6 October. SAP and its partners are using the opportunity to demonstrate, hands-on, the technology that will power new generation businesses.
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