What you haven't had up until this year is the critical mass of people joining online exchanges and moving all of their transactions from the phone and fax lines onto the Internet. Cargill is another company that's betting on business e-commerce. The company's North Star Steel subsidiary participates as a member of e-Steel. Novopoint, scheduled for a summer release, will act as an open portal between food-ingredient suppliers and food manufacturing companies. With the advent of the online realm, Neal Workman, Seafax founder, expanded, reinvented and renamed the business to reflect its new direction as an online seafood information and transaction source.
Workman likens the current state of the business online environment to twin silos.
One is the business exchange, Gofish, for example, while the other silo is represented by traditional fish companies. The winner in the online environment will be the first one to actually merge those two silos into one, he says. Right now, he says, Gofish is evolving from an IT company that services the seafood industry to becoming more like a traditional fish company. Our background has been in providing credit information and marketing tools to the seafood industry, but when you start to get in between the transactions as we are, now you are not just an observer, you are an enabler. You sit right in between a fishing boat and a fishing market.