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• Electronic Commerce allows businesses to transmit complex forms of information to each other.
  If you supply technical or graphical commodities, such as blueprints for pumps, using electronic commerce will give your engineers a way to send and receive complex graphical information. It gives your customers a way to browse your technical or graphical information so they make fewer purchasing errors. This saves both you and your customers a great deal of time and money in the long run.

Factors That Could Make Electronic Commerce Unprofitable

Electronic Commerce today is not for everyone. It is important to consider the potential downsides of this new business paradigm. It might be more profitable for you to wait and not enter this medium of business. Here are some factors that could make Electronic Commerce unprofitable:

• You might fail to estimate all the costs.
  If you already have a successful mail-order or larger EDI system, you shouldn't rush into electronic commerce until you price the costs and savings. If the numbers don't give you a profit, don't rush to buy the technology just because it is the trendy thing to do.
  As I mentioned before, if your customer base is not Web enabled, electronic commerce might take many years to pay off. For instance, if you own a small-town grocery and you are successful, don't go into electronic commerce unless your customers are Web enabled. Maintaining a Web site isn't of value to you unless you want to enter the business of shipping food items around the world.
• Do you have security concerns?
  Even though software companies and Internet standards now provide a security level that is probably superior to telephone or mail-order sales, make sure that you evaluate the costs of these strategies. If you are going to give your customers access to your inventory, you will probably need to invest in a firewall that separates your internal systems from systems that can be accessed by Web users.
  Furthermore, computer systems, such as the Oracle Web Application Server, will exist in the "demilitarized zone" outside the firewall, and the over- eager Web surfer might hack into it. Providing for security, paying for security audits , and correcting breaches in security should be budgeted into your electronic commerce plans.
  You also need to determine whether your electronic commerce will provide new information about customers, their locations, and their financial information on your internal computers. If electronic commerce opens these new areas of data processing, there are security risks with your own employees who have access to this new information that was previously not available online.

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• Consider customized development costs.
  As you price the cost of the Oracle Internet Commerce Server and all the other Web products and databases that you need for electronic commerce, make sure you include the costs of developing the actual front-end Web pages for your electronic commerce application. Does your company have programmers on-site who can do the job and interface to new technology? Do you need to hire outside consultants ? Make sure to shop around for the right solution because a poorly managed Web development effort can create enormous cost overruns.
• Consider proprietary information.
  If your company sells specialized technical knowledge or special services for the government or other industries, by converting to a Web-based electronic commerce system, you show the world, including your competitors , your customer policies, your market strategy, your financial mechanisms, and your product line. If this information could weaken your position as a provider of unique or state-of-the-art goods, maybe Web publishing and electronic commerce are not the pathways to take.
  For instance, if you sell circuit boards to the military, even though electronic commerce might make purchasing easier, your military customers might not want everyone in the world to know what types of inventory you sell them. Of course, you can use good security measures, but the fact that you allow access through the World Wide Web could jeopardize such unique relationships.

The Architecture of Oracle's Internet Commerce Server

Oracle's Internet Commerce Server should be considered a series of modules that you plug together in that nebulous space between you and your customers. It is a land both inside and outside firewalls and is where the actual transfer of money will take place.

The Big Picture

The Oracle Internet Commerce Server is one link in a chain that connects your computing systems to the World Wide Web.

At the lowest level is the Oracle universal data server, the standard Oracle RDBMS, which is an object-oriented server that can store a great deal of data and retrieve it quickly. Here, all the corporate information regarding your commerce is storedinformation such as customer orders, payments, invoices, and feeds to your accounting systems or applications.

Because this is your corporate data that you depend on for day-to-day operations, the architecture separates this world from the Internet with a firewall. A firewall is a computer that runs special software in conjunction with Oracle's SQL*Net to allow only specific addresses to communicate with your universal data server. A firewall can be pictured almost as a filter between you and the outside world. (See Figure 10.3.)

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Figure 10.3.
A firewall blocks
outside Telnet
addresses.

Every user in the world, when he or she logs in to your Web site, is issued a temporary Telnet address, which is a low-level networking address identifying every machine communicating with your Web site. A firewall blocks access to the universal data server by restricting network ports and Telnet addresses. Oracle licensed its SQL*Net application proxy software, which passes information through the firewalls, to a number of firewall manufacturers for free. Oracle also offers the Advanced Networking Option if security is a greater concern.

After passing through the firewall, browsers access what Internet gurus call the "demilitarized zone." I prefer to call it "no-man's-land." Here are the servers that directly connect and communicate with the outside world. In the Oracle architecture, this area is inhabited by the Web Application Server, the foundation of the Internet Commerce Server. This server communicates with all Web site visitors and coordinates the uses of the electronic commerce server cartridges (applications).

When you examine this architecture as a whole, you see a complex network of computers whose job is to communicate information, transact business, and provide security.

As you can see, to enter the field of electronic commerce as a business, you need to host not one, but a number of different servers, which need to communicate with each other and with the outside world. Unless you are a "ma-and-pa" shop selling coffee mugs over the Web, electronic commerce is not a trivial task for a business that wants to interface a Web-enabled market into their existing database, accounting, and financial software systems.

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