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Net Prophet - by Dylan Tweney

October 12, 1998

Commerce-enabled Web sites will lead a business revolution


Accpac International is making a bid to turn its accounting system into a comprehensive Internet-commerce backbone.

That's a canny move for a midrange accounting vendor. All too often, commerce Web sites start with zero back-end integration, which relegates these sites to the status of "proof of concept" prototypes. Once a company gets serious about doing business on the Internet, it needs to link its Web commerce site with its basic business systems: inventory, order processing, accounts receivable, and so forth.

Because the real benefits of I-commerce are realized only when the Web commerce site is well integrated with a company's back-end information systems, why not start your I-commerce effort with that back end?

Accpac hopes to make such integrations a simple matter for existing users of its software through partnerships with the I-commerce companies Ironside, which specializes in business-to-business procurement software, and Inex, a maker of business-to-consumer storefront software.

It's a great idea. But it's just the first step.

Enterprise mind shift

I-commerce is just a symptom of a larger, deeper shift in the way companies track their businesses.

Venerable management theorist Peter Drucker explored this shift in a recent Forbes ASAP cover story published Aug. 24. According to Drucker, the next information revolution is being led not by innovations in technology, but by new accounting practices.

In short, traditional accounting tracks only metrics internal to a company: expenses, revenues, and the like. But increasingly, executives must record, measure, and act on data outside their companies: market trends, potential customers' behavior, and the value added by suppliers.

Unfortunately, IT hasn't kept pace with this need and has focused instead on managing internal information.

I-commerce fits nicely into this picture -- companies can collect an unprecedented amount of information about customers and suppliers simply by doing business with them via the Internet.

For example, a commerce-enabled Web site is a rich source of data about customer behavior, because Web server logs can be analyzed to find out where customers come from, how they move through the Web site, what they click on, and so forth. This "click-stream analysis" provides a much greater level of detail than is available through traditional demographic market analysis, or through examination of sales records.

What's more, it allows companies to create marketing strategies that are not tied to specific market segments, but to individual customers.

This is much more than a technological change. It's also a fundamental shift in mindset, in accounting practices, and often in the way a company does business.

But make no mistake: I-commerce is the crucible in which the next generation of business is being brewed.

In this milieu, the software vendors that enable companies to meld traditional cost accounting with detailed customer-behavior analyses, personalization tools, and customer-management utilities are the ones to watch.

With such tools, I-commerce will become not just a new channel: It will be an entirely new way of doing business.


Dylan Tweney (dylan@infoworld.com) has been covering the Internet since 1993. He edits InfoWorld's intranet and Internet-commerce product reviews.


Previous columns by Dylan Tweney

Delivering the bits is only half the battle in Net software sales
October 5, 1998

Cold Fusion extends a friendly hand to Web application developers
September 28, 1998

Through the looking glass: I-commerce from the other side
September 21, 1998

Directory standard will be the linchpin of business commerce
September 14, 1998


Every column since August, 1997


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