The Emeryville Calif.-based company wants its service to be on every company's list of basic communication needs alongside phones and an Internet connection. CommerceRoute's niche is enabling external business partners to trade billing, orders and other information automatically over the Internet. The data arrives at CommerceRoute's server, which makes any necessary data conversions before routing it to the recipient. The service's translation capabilities let customers maintain records in their own data formats. And a company can program CommerceRoute's service to act on a set of business rules, such as checking inventory or starting a manufacturing request, adding workflow to the data translation and exchange process.
Customers pay only for transferred data.
Leaving Costs Behind Companies can license the software and install it on their own servers, but CommerceRoute promotes its GlobalConnect service, run with Intel Corp.'s Online Services, as the least intrusive and most valuable option. Both options allow companies to leave behind the costly maintenance of hard-coded connections between themselves and their partners, says Shirley. John S. DeSimone, a senior analyst at Boston-based research firm The Delphi Group, says that CommerceRoute's open architecture makes it flexible and scalable, enabling it to be customized into many environments. Shirley says CommerceRoute's value increases with the number of trading partners a company has. Song says she chose CommerceRoute because of its mapping and workflow capabilities.