November 3, 1997 Beware turnkey commerce tools: Most aren't, yet Confused about the Internet-commerce market? I don't blame you. With the proliferation of tools available, it's hard for anyone to make sense of the market. I have trouble making sense of it all -- and I'm researching and writing about this market full time. But one thing is clear to me: The way vendors and analysts have been thinking about the market's segments is painfully limiting. Forget about business-to-business commerce. While you're at it, forget about business-to-consumer. Both are radically inaccurate simplifications of the I-commerce industry. If you want to think clearly and profitably about what the Internet can do for your business, you will have to get beyond these unconsidered marketing terms. The truth is, the most successful I-commerce applications are really more like business-to-business-to-consumer. (And, I would call them that, too, except that the acronym BBC is already taken.) In reality, no Web store exists in a vacuum -- apart from the rest of a company's IT infrastructure -- at least for very long. Sure, there are Web stores where as soon as an order is received, somebody prints it out and hand-keys it into an order-entry system. But that kind of approach is obviously a temporary one. Where the real power of I-commerce comes in, however, is with the integration of front-end and back-end systems. And when those back-office systems are in turn linked up with your company's partners, distributors, and suppliers, then you can really start cooking, automating a host of transactions from order generation to fulfillment. Too many components That's why many so-called turnkey I-commerce products fall far short of their promises. Sure, you can set up an online store and publish it to your Web server in a matter of minutes using wizards, interactive dialog boxes, and templates. Some products even come with very sophisticated templates and wizards, which can cut your development time significantly by giving you pieces of HTML and JavaScript from which you can build a catalog, a search tool, a shopping cart, and more. But many products leave you hanging when it comes time to integrate your new Web store with your existing business applications. Inventory database integration? Too often products require you to export your existing database and then import it into the Web store. Real-time, live connections to the back-end database via ODBC or SQL calls are much more useful. How about integrating the purchase orders you collect into some kind of workflow system to ensure that they get routed to the right departments and individuals within your organization? For the most part, you're on your own. And if you want to automate some of your business-to-business relationships, generally you need yet another piece of software to do it, because most I-commerce products are aimed at either facilitating consumer transactions or business-to-business transactions -- not both. Sadly, many systems even leave you on your own when it comes to processing payments. Even though you bought a "turnkey" solution, you may find yourself in need of several other components, each of which must be carefully integrated into an increasingly complex I-commerce system. New tools needed That's the reality of I-commerce today. Fortunately, many vendors are starting to realize the need for new, more integrated applications. At the forefront are SAP and Intel, whose joint venture, Pandesic, promises truly integrated business applications with Web front ends for both customers and business partners. Pandesic's approach fits in well with SAP's overall strategy, which is becoming increasingly apparent: namely, to establish SAP's R/3 as a widely accepted platform for business applications. SAP's Accelerated SAP and Business API initiatives aim to bring this platform within the reach of small businesses as well as large enterprises, and if it's successful, the effects will be far-reaching. For instance, imagine a business application platform that lets you specify business relationships and rules at a high level of abstraction. With simple, perhaps icon-based, programming tools, non-programmers could sketch out the architecture of a transaction from beginning to end. Imagine: A customer places an order for a widget, the order is instantly routed through purchasing, accounting, and inventory systems, it is passed to the warehouse for shipping, and the system sends a purchase request off to the manufacturer if the widget inventory is running low. Of course, Pandesic is not the only company working towards such a vision -- it's one that's shared by many systems integrators and I-commerce consultants. But if SAP is successful in bringing R/3 to the masses, Pandesic will be well-positioned to take advantage of the wealth of new opportunities for integration of business processes. And that integration is what I-commerce is really all about. Dylan Tweney is the editor of InfoWorld's Focus on I-Commerce section. He welcomes your comments at dylan@infoworld.com. Missed a column? Don't despair -- click here to catch up.