Summary

The future direction of B2B e-commerce remains unclear. Today, it is impossible to know with clarity exactly what the ideal scenario will be for buyers, suppliers, and e-marketplaces. Will long-standing relationships be maintained, or will new value-added services offered by e-marketplaces replace them? No matter how B2B e-commerce shakes out, there are several factors that appear to be a certainty:

• Suppliers will remain competitive and empowered by implementing rich solutions that meet the new challenges and continue to add greater value and benefit in the future. Simply integrating and passing data is no longer enough.

• Buyers will continue to implement technology to improve their processes and reduce costs. In order to get the most from these systems, they will need to trade electronically with suppliers from every level of business size and complexity, using the standards they have invested heavily in and worked hard to develop.

• Market makers will develop new business models and value-added services to attract buyers and sellers across vertical, regional, and other markets. Like buyers, market makers need maximum transaction volume from electronic suppliers to reach liquidity in their markets for success.

• Web services will become ubiquitous as technologies allow these services to be built effectively, exposed properly to customers on the Web, and have the ability to be programmatically discovered and implemented^[1].

So, the issue becomes when and how (not if) you will e-commerce-enable your business. How much e-commerce can accelerate your e-business success is in part determined by the technology platform that you choose today and the intelligence you put behind your decisions.

Finally, it may come as a great surprise, but most electronic commerce enterprises are not prepared for success. Electronic commerce enterprises climb a steep information technology ramp that must provide bulletproof continuous availability, scalability for millions of users, and sophisticated user-relationship-management clickstream data warehouses in the first months of business. Ironically, a hugely successful Web site can mean either an exploding business success or an exploding business plan, depending on how well the e-commerce enterprise plans and executes its information technology infrastructure.