Relax. Street did not understand AOL business model either and look at it today. Here is the space as I see it:
web interface - BVSN, Vignette, Allaire, Shopsite
order processing - Transact4
back end - SAP, Peoplesoft, Oracle
From their website: . This award-winning, industry-proven system provides a complete set of end-to-end commerce services including online customer authentication and authorization; online order and payment processing; automated tax and shipping calculations; online order tracking and status; and online customer service. And unlike other solutions, Transact enables companies to bring products and services to the Internet market rapidly and aggressively using the best digital merchandising tools available.
Nobody is competing in this space. OMKT has the standardized solution. Sure, you might want to put a different front end on it, but to get that web dial tone, or commerce tone, you need an infinitely scalable, highly reliable order processing infrastructure. This was the main problem last christmas, everybody had a web site, but hadn't set up the internal infrastruture to process them. Transact is going to provide that infrastructure link to the current infrastructure.
The deals with Lycos, AOL, ICOMS, Cisco, all confirm the truth to the above.
bp
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