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C-commerce to dominate the Internet world: GartnerGroup

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CIOL Bureau
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GartnerGroup has identified a complex form of e-business that is emerging as a dominant trend in the information technology (IT) world. The new "collaborative commerce" (c-commerce) model describes the collaborative and fluid interaction of a community of personnel, business partners and customers that is joined together by Internet, component and integration technologies, resulting in agile but highly integrated "virtual" multi-company enterprises.

By enabling multiple trading partners to work interactively online, c-commerce strategies will produce lower costs, improve the quality of products and services, increase innovation and optimize trading opportunities. According to the GartnerGroup report

C-commerce: The New Arena for Business Applications, c-commerce network applications will replace Web-enabled, but static, supply chain applications as the dominant business application model by 2002. The emerging c-commerce trend will be a part of Fortune 1000 IT strategies by 2004.



According to a Gartner release, C-commerce applications will ultimately expand capabilities across the supply chain. For example, supply chain "available-to-promise" functionality will enable enterprises to offer customers a more accurate reflection of when and how much of an order may be distributed, based on looking beyond the next upstream supplier all the way to the supply chain source.



C-commerce will also bring about an increase in application hosting as enterprises look to c-commerce vendors to manage the c-commerce "traffic" and tackle the integration challenges that will require specific and scarce skills.



The release said that the key factors that are driving the creation of c-commerce are the emergence of global shop floors and virtual enterprises, as well as the proliferation of marketing and delivery channels. Moreover, the speed at which business is transacted and the increased emphasis on time-based competition enables the substitution of technology for human contact in high-velocity information and knowledge exchange applications.



The technologies that are enabling c-commerce evolution include the growth of the Web, component architectures, acceptance of emerging standards such as XML (Extensible Markup Language) and collaborative technologies, including agents. In addition, integration technologies from more established IT vendors such as IBM, Microsoft and SAP are gaining wider acceptance as de facto standards, according to Bond.



The next evolution of business applications, including ERP, enterprise asset management, engineering, supply chain planning and front-office systems, will have to incorporate c-commerce strategies. Application vendors that do not build c-commerce infrastructures (and most will not) will have to enable their products to connect to them. IT managers will have to develop strategies so that they align with the vendors that demonstrate a strategic focus on the enterprise's industry -- for example, demonstrating an understanding of consumer packaged goods, automotive, financial services, healthcare and others.

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