September 21, 1998

I-commerce giants showcase OBI protocol

By Matthew Nelson
InfoWorld Electric

IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Netscape, and Microsoft will demonstrate their efforts to streamline interoperability with Internet-commerce applications at the Internet Commerce Exposition (ICE) in Los Angeles this week.

ICE will feature a demonstration of the Open Buying on the Internet (OBI) protocol and announcements of new products that support it, and HP will announce the next version of its Change Engine system for automating business processes.

HP's Change Engine 3.0 for Enterprise Process Management allows users to manage the flow of information across an enterprise for a number of purposes, including for procurement systems, and to alter the process flow with little difficulty.

"By running Change Engine across your entire enterprise, you have the ability to manage your entire business process suite," said Dirk Jannasch, HP's Change Engine product marketing manager. "The next step is to run business processes across the extended enterprise."

Change Engine 3.0 operates on Windows NT and HP-UX systems and comes with six components that HP will begin releasing Oct. 28. Pricing is yet to be determined.

As part of the OBI Interoperability Action Showcase at ICE, Netscape, IBM, Microsoft, Connect, and others plan to demonstrate the interoperability of their I-commerce systems using the OBI protocol.

The demonstration could make Internet merchants and developers take the protocol more seriously, according to analysts.

"OBI seems to be stuck a little bit in the standards netherworld," said Vernon Keenan, Internet analyst for Keenan Vision, in San Francisco. "For [I-commerce] to really take off, first we need to have further acceptance of application servers combined with deployment of e-commerce applications that use OBI components."

Netscape will also announce that the upgrade of its BuyerXpert automated procurement system, Version 1.5.1, will be OBI-compliant.

Netscape's BuyerXpert 1.5.1 will also include workflow enhancements such as the capability of approving requisitions by e-mail and split line items by different general ledger codes. Several other companies are planning to make announcements at ICE.

• CyberSource is set to ship CyberSource IVS 3.0, an on-demand Internet fraud screening application as part of its on-demand commerce applications.
  
  
• SpaceWorks is scheduled to announce that its OrderManager 4.0 will ship by the end of the year.
  
  
• Inference will announce that its CBR Content Navigator 3.5 for automating customer e-mail responses now operates using the Extensible Markup Language.

Hewlett-Packard Co., in Cupertino., Calif., is at www.hp.com. Netscape Communications Corp., in Mountain View., Calif., is at www.netscape.com.

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