But what form does B2B take? Well, it comes in all flavors. On the one end of the spectrum, companies like Dell and CISCO aggressively sell their offerings to other businesses on the Net and offer their customers configuration tools to help ensure the correct order is placed. The only difference here from the consumer market is that many of these companies provide their customers with the same access their employees have to their knowledge data bases hence, improving the quality of their on-going support.
While traditional electronic data interchange (EDI) is the backbone of large companies, Internet EDI allows EDI transactions to reach small and medium-size businesses. In the pursuit of fully automating their supply chain, some companies have contracted the service of intermediaries to e-commerce enable all their trading partners. For example, CISCO and Sears, Roebuck and Co. have contracted with SPC Commerce for Trading Partner Enablement. This is an outsourced service that guarantees that trading partners of any size or level of e-commerce sophistication attain 100% e-commerce compliance through Internet-based forms, fax or paper conversions.
Intermediation is definitely the name of the game in business-to-business commerce. These new intermediaries come with a sleuth of different names - hubs, vortex companies or simply infomediaries. They all share, however, the same goal of facilitating business-to-business commerce by leveraging the Internet and organizing virtual market places.
Experts forecast that these new intermediaries will shape the landscape of B2B commerce and account for almost 25% of the total volume of business. If Forrester's estimate of one trillion dollars for B2B materialize by 2003, this would make it a very attractive business to be in.
These infomediaries typically specialize horizontally along a business function or vertically along an industry.
A well-known functional hub is Ariba, a name synonymous with Operating Resource Management (ORM). Ariba provides a software solution to automate the internal procurement processes of organizations and a network for connecting buyers to suppliers.
Vertical hubs have become the darlings of the manufacturing sector. These hubs match buyers and sellers in a specific industry and provide industry-specific content. For example, Fast Parts is the NASDAQ of parts for the electronics industry. Other vertical hubs include Chemdex for the specialty industry, MetalSite for metals and PaperExchange.com for paper products.
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