Stephen,
That news regarding a new portal agreement confirms that there's a demand for large-scale e-commerce markets, and that CMRC is in a position to deliver those services. It would not surprise me several large exchange portals with large numbers of smaller, more vertical exchanges -- and everything in between. I guess we're calling them portals which is about as useful as calling them stargates or channels -- the vocabulary is being made up as we go along.
The problem with the software licensing angle is that all the software required is already out there, in one form or another. The missing pieces are open and oftentimes free of charge. I don't see software licensing amounting to a hill of Java Beans for these companies.
1. Product and service information will be extracted from existing information systems. That is, from their current IBM or Oracle database, for example.
2. That information will be published to an agreed upon standard for the given domain. For example, coffee might require moisture content, growing region, harvest date, a price structure and so on. All the coffee producers would have to use an identical format to describe their coffee. That's where the freely available XML technology comes in. That's where IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and everybody else has been focusing their attention.
3. Once they have published their product information to a standard format (using tools from IBM and Oracle for example), they can deliver that information to any portal they choose. Again, a portal is just an electronic exchange, or marketplace. The portals will communicate with each other directly and optionally through virtual brokers represented by super-portals like CMRC.
If anybody is investing because they think CMRC is going to have a lock on the market they are sadly mistaken. Nowadays companies won't stand for proprietary lock-ins. CMRC is not going to be able to dictate anything, on the contrary. That is my take on the situation, for whatever it's worth. |
