That's why so many vendors are scrambling to expand their offerings through internal development and via a frenzy of partnerships and mergers. But so far, their solutions are piecemeal. Ariba Inc. Until now, most of the vendors that have emerged in the E-commerce industry over the past two years have carved neat niches for themselves without too much overlap. Its rival, Commerce One Inc., excels in supply-side networks and providing some marketplace interoperability. Smaller startups, such as RightWorks, which began in procurement software, Tradeum, Tradex Technologies, and Trading Dynamics offer exchange and auction software for E-marketplaces.
Most vendors stake out narrow slices of the market pie and offer partial solutions for users.
E-fulfillment and order management is in the court of Yantra, and catalog aggregation customization is handled by startups such as CardoNet, Cohera, Mergent Systems, OnDisplay, and Requisite Technologies. Extricity and webMethods provide proprietary and Extensible Markup Language-based middleware and interfaces that allow uniform views of data from different suppliers and buyers. But as users' needs expand, vendors have to change as well. The marketplace is bringing on more than 250 suppliers and scores of large business buyers-but first they have to go through lengthy integration of existing architectures with the marketplace software. An integrated software suite will help us do collaborative commerce, setting up business-process methodologies and associated workflow to ensure that orders are tracked, fulfilled, delivered, and billed across multiple buyers and suppliers.