South Africa's latest business-to-business e-commerce portal, saXchange, is running exclusively on a Sun platform and using Sun's e-commerce architecture, iPlanet.
saXchange is one of a growing number of Service Providers (SPs) partnering with Sun - over 80% of the US's Internet backbone traffic and 15 of the top 20 SPs already run on Sun systems. These figures are being fuelled as more and more e-commerce businesses open up shop.
The new portal, launched last week and backed by Arthur Andersen, offers buyers and suppliers in various local industry sectors turnkey technology solutions, freeing them up to concentrate on their core competencies.
Says saXchange head Pedro Viudez: "We went with Sun because after testing various platforms, we found Sun's solutions robust, scaleable and with appropriate functionality. Some of its competitors are making a lot of noise, but they do not have a product available."
Willem Coetzee, sales manager: telecommunications for Sun Microsystems SA, says: "saXchange turned to us for their dot.com platform and architecture because of our immense Internet expertise. This, combined with Sun's ServiceProvider.com initiative - an individually tailored, complete package of products, programs, business practices and services - makes us the ideal partner for SPs as they deliver IP-based services to their customers."
The e-commerce portal uses Sun Microsystems' iPlanet software solutions, running on a Sun platform, to provide the retail, financial, travel, hospitality, office products and foods industry sectors with a web solution that lets them define how they want to conduct business-to-business c-commerce within their supply chains.
saXchange's customer offerings include Web development, e-Strategy, e-Branding, and e-Marketing, systems integration, trading exchange, hosting, data warehousing, financial systems and systems architecture.
According to Viudez, the iPlanet software solutions are being used to integrate industry supply chains and drive out non value-added costs. They were specifically chosen as they facilitate easy integration to enterprise resource solutions such as Oracle, JD Edwards and SAP, as well as bespoke applications running in many South African companies.
"Using Sun to develop pre-configured business-to-business e-commerce solutions for our customers, frees these companies up to concentrate on their core competencies, knowing that their technology requirements are being well taken care of, " says Viudez.
"Today's SPs are focused on helping customers keep pace with technology and providing the economies of scale needed to make an Internet presence practical for companies of all sizes. To achieve this they need IT products, services and solutions that let them add real value to their customer base. Sun enables SPs to do just that," says Coetzee.
"As the company who put the dot in .com, Sun continues to drive the rapid industry shift towards the SP model, through the industry's most compelling end-to-end solution set of products, business practices and services," Coetzee concludes.
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