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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
GE-NETSCAPE VENTURE TO UNVEIL COMMERCE PRODUCTS
Actra's software lets EDI users connect
through the Web
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- By Bill Roberts, Web Week
- Actra Business Systems, the long-silent joint venture
between GE Information Services and Netscape
Communications Corp., was expected to announce this week
a new family of business-to-business electronic commerce
products, including a product that supports EDI on the
Internet.
- Early adopters and analysts briefed in advance of the
announcement hailed the Actra CrossCommerce platform as
the best solution to date for extending EDI to business
partners over the Internet. They said it was a clear sign
that the joint venture, founded in April 1996, had done
its homework before bringing its first products to
market.
- EDI--Electronic Data Interchange--is a set of
transmission and data protocols used in the commercial
world to send digital versions of purchase orders,
invoices, and other documents over private value-added
networks.
- "EDI as it existed in the past has been used by most
organizations to automate only the most popular
transactions with only the most active vendors," said
Mike Kennedy, an analyst at the Meta Group. "With Actra,
I see the opportunity to put into place an umbrella
environment whether you use EDI or not." Because Actra's
products focus both on the procurement cycles of
corporate buyers and the order-management function of
corporate sellers, analysts said Actra will help to
define a new class of software for business-to-business
electronic commerce.
- "This is very different from business-to-consumer,"
said Harry Tse, an analyst at the Yankee Group, Boston.
"There are a lot of vendors out there that claim they do
business- to-business, but they're really just catalog,
order-placement, and credit card transaction
technologies." Tse said the Actra products will offer a
complete business-to-business solution, one that will put
the company ahead of Sterling Commerce, Harbinger Corp.,
and others.
- Actra CrossCommerce is a suite of five products
anchored by ECXpert, a middleware platform upon which
companies can build and deploy Net-based electronic
commerce programs that integrate with existing EDI and
legacy systems.
- ECXpert provides communication through virtually any
protocol including EDI, FTP, SMTP, and HTTP. It can plug
into any back-end legacy system, and it offers APIs for
the credit card payment transaction systems from VeriFone
and CyberCash. ECXpert is expected to be available by the
end of the month for Sun's Solaris operating system and
later for Windows NT and other variations of Unix.
Pricing starts at $25,000 for a single processor.
- Two other products in the CrossCommerce suite,
OrderXpert Buyer and OrderXpert Seller, are for managing
corporate selling and buying over the Internet. Both
products come bundled with ECXpert and its EDI
capabilities. They will be available later this year, the
company said. Pricing has not been set.
- The electronic-catalog and search-engine technologies
that are in OrderXpert Seller were licensed from Cadis
Corp., the maker of Krakatoa software, which is used on
several corporate Web sites for industrial sales and
marketing. Krakatoa, one of the first Java- based
applications, is highly regarded for its parametric
search capabilities that allow people to search based on
attributes, rather than keywords, and to narrow the
search on successive queries until they find the right
product. It is especially useful for end users looking
for industrial products.
- The last two products in the CrossCommerce family are
MerchantXpert and PublishingXpert, which are the fully
rearchitected 2.0 versions of Netscape Merchant Server
and Netscape Publisher Server, respectively. Both will be
available later this year.
- Actra CrossCommerce is entirely object-oriented using
the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and
is based on other open Internet standards, including the
Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP), S/MIME, SL, EDIINT,
and Java. The management presentation layer is entirely
written in Java and JavaScript, and can be accessed with
any Java-enabled Web browser. The server side is written
in C++.
- Early adopters and beta testers have included Wells
Fargo Bank, Bay Networks Inc., Boise Cascade Corp., and
CBS SportsLine.
- Laura Longcore, marketing systems manager for Boise
Cascade Office Products, Itasca, Ill., said the company
chose ECXpert because of its ability to handle any
format-to-format translation, including, but not limited
to, EDI. "It has a lot of versatility," she said.
- Analysts praised Actra's vision and understanding of
business-to-business commerce as much as they applauded
the products themselves.
- "I was quite pleased by what I saw," said Meta
Group's Kennedy. "From GEIS they get guys who understand
EDI. From Netscape they get guys who understand Internet
technologies. It's a good blend."
- Reprinted from Web Week, Volume 3, Issue 15, May 19,
1997 © Mecklermedia Corp. All rights reserved.
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