Commerce One, Intershop Ally on Connecting Suppliers to E-Marketplaces
Commerce One and Intershop Communications have extended their strategic alliance, a move designed to enable suppliers to connect to e-marketplaces. With this extension to their partnership, Commerce One, which offers electronic trading exchange applications and Intershop, which provides commerce server software platforms, are specifically targeting Global 2000 suppliers. Under terms of the alliance, suppliers will be able to use Intershop-based solutions to leverage Commerce One MarketSite.net, a U.S. e-marketplace for exchanging goods and services among businesses worldwide.
As part of the agreement, Commerce One and Intershop will jointly promote and market e-commerce solutions in addition to aligning, educating, and compensating their global sales forces to offer complementary solutions. Commerce One will also include Intershop as part of its supplier adoption efforts. In return, Intershop will recommend Commerce One products and services to its customers interested in procurement and enabling trading networks.
The two companies have already partnered on a number of joint customer engagements, one involving Shell Chemical Co. Such arrangements allow Commerce One and Intershop to give suppliers the ability to manage e-marketplaces as Internet selling channels by presenting product catalogs and capturing orders, reaching additional customers, accessing multiple marketing, and selling anywhere on the Internet.
Commerce One boasts the world's largest B2B trading community, the Commerce One Global Trading Web, a network of many open e-marketplaces.
Intershop Communications, a much smaller player than its biggest rival, Broad Vision, has been making news over the last few months. Last June, Intershop announced a partnership with HP, agreeing to port its enfinity suite to HP-UX. The suite already runs on Windows NT. In return, HP agreed to what it called a "substantial" marketing investment to promote and market Intershop's e-commerce solutions to HP customers, including medium- to large-sized businesses and dot coms. HP also agreed to deploy Intershop enfinity as one of the software applications used for its own B2B e-commerce initiatives.
Last month, Intershop announced that it had acquired Subotnic GmbH. Berlin-based Subotnic offers Internet-based content management software that can be integrated with e-commerce systems.
Intershop, a European import now based in San Francisco, CA, commands an edge over many of its competitors because its software was designed with internationalization issues in mind.