Microsoft aims to take the strain out of e-commerce soon -- with a little help from its E-Business Acceleration package
Microsoft last week rolled out a programme designed to help companies more easily participate in business-to-business e-commerce. Using a mix of new products and expanded partnerships, E-Business Acceleration is designed to let suppliers of all sizes tap into online exchanges and other online e-procurement systems, and to help them manage such tasks as catalogues, orders and payment processing.
The new products in the E-Business Acceleration programme include the Microsoft bCentral Commerce Manager, which is designed to let suppliers move their products from one e-marketplace to another, conduct business online with larger trading partners and keep tabs on their overall e-commerce activity. Commerce Manager will be available later this month.
The Microsoft Supplier Accelerator product, meanwhile, will enable companies to manage the publishing of catalogues and processing of orders across e-marketplaces and with buyers' systems.
Supplier Accelerator is based on Commerce Server 2000, BizTalk Server 2000 and SQL Server 2000. Pricing and availability will be announced at a later date. Accelerator can either be hosted or installed on site.
Through Microsoft's dot-Net Enterprise Servers, suppliers in the programme will realise faster and easier integration with e-marketplaces developed by Commerce One, Ariba, Clarus and VerticalNet, said Microsoft.
