A variety of vendors are making Internet commerce announcements this week in conjunction with the Internet World trade show in New York.
IBM (IBM) subsidiary Lotus Development will announce pricing for two add-ons to its Domino Web server which are due in the first quarter.
Lotus will announce pricing and further details on Domino.Merchant e-commerce tools, and Domino.Broadcast, which incorporates PointCast's "push" publishing technology for broadcasting corporate and other news to users on the corporate intranet. The tools will be priced at roughly $5,000 each.
Open Market will introduce version 2.3 of its OM-Transact electronic commerce software, adding an emphasis on business-to-business Internet commerce to its existing business-to-consumer functions.
New features include sales purchase orders, links to existing electronic data interchange, order, and entry fulfillment systems; user profile APIs for custom content and custom pricing, support for multiple currencies and languages, and support for the Hewlett-Packard (HWP)and Silicon Graphics' (SGI) versions of Unix.
The system is licensed for a base price of $250,000; service providers who host merchant Web sites are charged an additional fee of $3,000 per merchant. CNET: The Computer Network is using OM-Transact for its new BUYDIRECT software that launched today.
The Vision Factory A/S, a Danish firm, will introduce its Cat@log Direct-to-Web tools suite for creating and running catalogs and commerce sites based on databases for high-volume Net-based businesses. Available for Windows NT and Unix, Cat@log offers a complete ODBC interface and integrates with existing IT systems and processes. Catalog pages are dynamically modified as the database changes. It includes a "builder" module for site creation, a "manager" module to keep the site synchronized with the core database, and a "customer statistics" module to track shopping and buying patterns.
Progress Software will demonstrate its WebSpeed tool to Web-enable transactional databases. It links a Web site's front-end interface to back-end business processes such as billing, inventory databases, credit checks, and fulfillment. WebSpeed, shipping now, has been implemented for intranets, and Internet use is expected to follow soon.
Xoom Software will launch its subscription-based "on-demand software network" that provides a full suite of office and personal productivity software and content for $30 a year. Subscribers can download an email filtering robot, a Word-compatible word processor, an Excel-compatible spreadsheet, a personal information manager, a photo retouching program, clip art, sounds, and videos.
Worlds Incorporated will announce that it is adding electronic commerce component to its Virtual Worlds tools, working with a major e-commerce vendor.
Oracle (ORCL) is slated to announce a beta program for the company's merchant server, code-named Apollo.
Silicon Graphics, Netscape (NSCP), and Microsoft (MSFT) all plan e-commerce announcements.
Dow Jones will unveil its latest product, Dow Vision, a custom news-filtering service for both the corporate Internet and intranet environments.
Also at Internet World, the Global Internet Project, a group of top executives from Internet companies chaired by Netscape chairman Jim Clark, will present a white paper on e-commerce and the growth of the networked world.
Both AT&T Easy Commerce and O'Reilly & Associates also will release studies on the current state of Internet commerce. The new Internet Advertising Bureau will release its figures on the size of the Internet advertising market, based on figures submitted anonymously by ad-supported Web sites.