Newsletter

October 11, 2000

Buy Decision: Application Packages

ObjectSpace Packages Enables E-Markets

Net markets, business-to-business exchanges, public vs. private marketplaces, e-markets - these are all synonymous terms. How does the enterprise get in the game today? That is a question we will be trying to answer for some time now. Many companies will come forward with solutions. Probably no product or service supplier has the complete solution. It will fall to the IT professionals to piece together what's available to buy in a way that works for their own organizations, and in a way that is economical and practical. Part of the task will be to look at what the industry is offering.

In this spirit, ObjectSpace has announced OpenBusiness 2.0, a set of integrated modules that help companies make their software assets available to business partners via the Internet. Leveraging its history in middleware to support distributed computing, ObjectSpace provides a platform for "Web services." These are electronic assets published to a network for use by a variety of clients. Web services can range from time-of-day components to complex travel booking functions. Complex Web services can be assembled from simple Web services.

OpenBusiness includes a browser-based Web services portal, which provides graphical access to an underlying Web services catalog. Publishers of Web services can surface components including EJB, CORBA, COM and RMI. A framework allows third parties to extend OpenBusiness and add new service types. OpenBusiness is said to automatically perform the protocol conversions necessary to allow any kind of client to access any Web service.

OpenBusiness 2.0 also supports the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), created in late 1999 by developers at DevelopMentor, Inc., Microsoft and UserLand Software as a standard to bridge XML and HTTP. These companies recently submitted SOAP 1.1 to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for standardization.

"We wanted to focus on the problem of wiring organizations together," said Bruce Flory, vice president of marketing for ObjectSpace, based in Dallas. Customers of OpenBusiness include Galileo International, Inc., the global travel services provider that operates a suite of travel management services available to wireless devices. Launched in June 2000, Galileo offers computerized reservation systems linking airlines, car rental companies and hotels. Galileo chose OpenBusiness to support its solution and enable protocols including HTTP and the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) to work together.

"Some of our best successes have been on the opportunity side," said Flory, referring to customers seeking to expand their markets as opposed to focusing on lower expenses.

Pricing for OpenBusiness 2.0 starts at $200,0000. Services can easily double that pricetag, Flory indicated.

Challenges in this early adopter e-market environment include multiparty transaction integrity, he said. Solutions may involve negotiated settlements as opposed to two-phase commit rollbacks. "You can't count on rolling everyone back. We're looking at compensating scenarios," he said.

www.objectspace.com

Buy Decision: Application Packages

Yantra Supports Multi-Enterprise B2B

One of the more challenging net market areas is supporting the logistical requirements of manufacturers, distributors and retailers. This requires the software system to support very complex transactions across multiple vendors. Other labels that can be applied to the area include: supply chain execution, Internet-based vendor management, extraprise workflow management and extraprise transaction management.

Yantra Corp., Acton, Mass., positions squarely in the middle of this challenging market. The firm recently released PureEcommerce 3.0, a solution supporting multi-enterprise, multichannel workflow in real time, enabling companies to manage transactions across an extended enterprise.

Founded in 1995, Yantra is a spinoff of Infosys, Ltd., the Bangladore, India-based systems integrator that is one of the top development organizations in the world, having achieved a Capability Maturity Model Level 5 designation. Yantra has commercialized software built on Infosys engagements.

The company's original product was Distribution Control System (DCS), for supporting high-volume pick, pack and shop operations, and optimizing warehousing and transportation. Seeing an opportunity two years ago to extend into e-commerce, the company added two products: PureEcommerce Platform, which supports fulfillment and order management, business rules, workflow management, dynamic sourcing and reverse logistics, and workflow management; and PureEcommerce Portal, which provides collaboration support features including a drop ship interface, carrier integration and also reverse logistics (returns). PureEcommerce bundles all three applications together.

Release 3.0 is aimed at complex enterprises with a multichannel workflow. Customers of PureEcommerce include Vertical Net, the business-to-business community of commerce supporting multiple industries; and SciQuest.com, the business-to-business net market for scientific products used by pharmaceutical, clinical, chemical and industrial organizations.

Yantra has 270 employees; 120 of them are developers. The browser-based client components of PureEcommerce are built with Java and EJB components; XML is used as the chief data integration format; Unix and Windows are supported; and the BEA WebLogic application server is supported today. Pure Ecommerce integrates with a number of complementary products including those from Broadvision, Blue Martini and WebMethods.

Highlights of the 3.0 version include the ability to configure by buyer, supplier or the enterprise. "We can send a single order into different ERP systems or into a warehouse system," said Rob Sweeney, director of product management with Yantra. The system can also share information with third-party logistics firms, a differentiator from competitors, he said. The Pure Ecommerce applications are delivered with templates that outline business processes, such as inventory sourcing. Customers can tailor the templates with tools provided.

Pricing is based on customer transaction volumes. For example, one million transactions per year starts at $500,000. The typical customer pays $1 million per year.

A year ago, Yantra was focused on selling only to pure dot-coms. Now the company has expanded its target. "The recent shakeout in the B2C and B2B space gives the brick and mortars time, and enabling e-business is a major question the brick and mortars are addressing today," said Sweeney. Hallmark and Motorola are two brick-and-mortar companies who fit this profile, he said.

E-Business Readiness

CrediView Detects Online Fraud Before It Hurts

CrediView last week launched a service it says will help online merchants detect and prevent the fraudulent transactions that can wreak havoc with their bottom line.

Online retailers experience 12 times more fraud than traditional retailers, according to the Gartner Group. CrediView goes further, saying transaction fraud is up to 25 times higher online than in traditional retail environments. The damage is potentially devastating, considering that a retailer with a 5% profit margin would have to sell $20 worth of goods to make up for every $1 in fraud.

CrediView, based in Menlo Park, Calif., aims to reduce that number using a combination of neural network technology, logical regression models and a homegrown analytical technique to identify patterns of online behavior likely to result in fraudulent transactions.

The proprietary technique, called SE, was developed by Ron Rymon, president and CEO of CrediView, who holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania and was a computer science professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He worked with credit card issuers and service providers to implement the technique.

CrediView can look at up to 120 parameters of a transaction, including information regarding the merchant and the customer, such as the frequency and value of a customer's transactions. The analysis can also consider Web statistics, such as how long a customer spent on the site and the number of products they looked at. None of the data is personal, such as credit card numbers; rather, the technology relies on identifying patterns that have led to fraud in the past. Ultimately, it's up to the client to determine which parameters make the most sense to consider, with most opting to look at 30 to 70.

To use the service, dubbed eCredible, merchants merely install code that packages transactions into an XML format and sends them to CrediView for processing. Transactions are sent to a particular "cartridge" on CrediView servers tailored to the most appropriate category of product. For instance, fraud patterns for electronics may be different from those for clothing, Rymon said.

For each transaction, it takes less than one second for CrediView to apply its analytical techniques and get back to the merchant with a score representing the level of risk. For the handful of transactions that have a high risk attached, merchants can employ the CrediView Fraud Investigation Station to dig deeper into the transaction and reveal the reason for the bad rating. You can look at phone listings and maps to match phone numbers with addresses, or check the distance between a billing and shipping address, for example.

CrediView details where abnormalities exist and gives merchants the option to call customers and clear up any information before approving or rejecting the sale.

In tests at nine beta sites, the service has so far detected more than 90% of all fraudulent transactions, Rymon said.

CrediView offers two levels of the service. ECredible Guard is provided on a per-transaction fee that is currently 10 cents per transaction, if previously developed cartridges are employed. Custom cartridges would cost extra.

ECredible Guarantee provides merchants with a 100% guarantee against fraud, with CrediView picking up the tab for any fraudulent transactions its service doesn't catch. That service is priced on a per-customer basis, depending on the type of company, its fraud history and other variables.

www.crediview.com

IT Sourcing

Tilion Preps Supply Chain Reporting Service

Another player is preparing to debut on the supply chain management scene, with an online twist.

Tilion, Inc. is in beta test with its supply chain management service, an online offering that purports to streamline what today is a largely manual process. Typically each link in the supply chain - including suppliers, shipping firms, sales and marketing channels, among others - fills out monthly reports detailing the supplies or services it has provided to a given company and what is in the pipeline. Besides being a labor-intensive process, it's not very timely. A manufacturer, for example, may not find out it won't receive a key product component from a primary supplier until it is far too late to get it elsewhere.

Operating out of an old Digital Equipment Corp. building in Maynard, Mass., Tilion says it can solve the problem using a mix of technologies including Novell, Inc.'s NDS directory, Entrust Technologies, Inc. public-key infrastructure (PKI) tools and XML.

Tilion is now in beta test with a couple of large companies and the results so far are promising, said Christopher Stone, Tilion's president and CEO. Stone founded the company in January of this year, following more than two years as an executive vice president at Novell. He founded the Object Management Group in 1989 and served as its president before joining Novell in 1997.

Tilion has not yet formally announced its service, but last week held a little soiree for press and analysts at a swank Boston restaurant. On hand was Eric Schmidt, Novell's president and CEO, and John Ryan, president and CEO of Entrust, both of whom are on the Tilion board.

The basic idea behind Tilion is to give companies greater visibility into their various supply chain partners, identify trouble spots and to do it painlessly for all concerned. It includes analytical technology that will help companies identify delays in the chain in time for alternative suppliers to be found, such that product shipments aren't delayed.

Companies involved in the supply chain need only feed Tilion data in XML format, using an agent supplied by Tilion. Tilion helps suppliers determine what data they need to send and to format it appropriately. Entrust's PKI technology is employed to forge a secure connection between suppliers and Tilion, and to ensure that no company can see any data that it shouldn't. "It's fine-grained access control," says Tim Sloane, Tilion's vice president of product development.

While many of the companies in any given supply chain may be relatively small, with little or no XML expertise, they so far have been open to getting some XML education, Sloan said. He admits the idea of giving product information to a third party, who is also collecting information from competing companies and storing it in a single database, can give suppliers pause. But when suppliers learn that Tilion's service can put an end to the finger pointing over issues such as whether supplies were shipped on time, he says they quickly change their tune.

Novell Directory Services is used to keep track of the various players' permissions, to make sure their data is properly identified in the Tilion database and to Entrust digital certificates, among other functions.

Tilion expects its first beta customer to go live with the service in November. General availability is scheduled for first quarter of next year.

www.tilion.com

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