03/30/2004

If IT companies are going to be ready for the pending economic upturn, they're going to have to find a way to clear a huge hurdle: How to get all their partners on board for full B2B integration, when 80 percent of them cannot afford the software, hardware and human investment required.

To that end, blue chip companies are trading in big-budget, complex B2B integration solutions in favor of an "Intelligent Network" that allows them to link with their trading partners without the cost and headaches of traditional, point-to-point B2B integration.

The intelligent network approach not only delivers partner integration at a fraction of the cost of traditional B2B, but also delivers more capabilities.

E2open and its partners are fundamentally changing the economics of partner integration by lowering total cost of ownership enough to drive mass adoption.

For example, they'll be offering a free B2B client targeting SME suppliers. This client eliminates the need to purchase and manage tens of thousands of dollars worth of software at hundreds of thousands of dollars annual management cost. E2open thinks this move will help solve the "last mile" problem of traditional B2B integration efforts by allowing even the smallest suppliers and partners to participate.

While traditional approaches to partner integration - including EDI and point-to-point B2Bi - have reached the saturation point at between 10-20 percent adoption due to high costs and complexity, E2open feels it has helped enable some of the industry's largest supply networks, while delivering proven savings in excess of 50 percent for supply chain hubs and up to 80 percent for individual trading partners. In a 300-partner configuration, E2open can provide total ecosystem savings of 71 percent across a supply network, representing savings exceeding $60 million over a 3-year horizon.

"After enabling more than 30 major supply chain hubs and over 2,500 trading partners, we have a clear understanding of the economics involved with large-scale partner integration," said Greg Clark, E2open president and CEO. "Architecturally, we have applied a proven network-based model - similar to what exists in the telephone industry today where low-cost handsets communicate via a global network, rather than on a point-to-point basis - and applied it to the challenge of integrating large numbers of B2B trading partners. We have proven that we can dramatically reduce integration costs and fundamentally change the way end-to-end business processes are managed throughout the industry."

E2open also has introduced the E2open B2B Client, an easy-to-install and -use B2B integration software, which provides companies lacking a B2B infrastructure with one option of connecting to their customers and partners. For no extra cost, E2open says, companies of any size can download and install the E2open B2B Client in minutes and gain Web services-enabled B2B functionality in a matter of hours, a drastic improvement over traditional approaches that often take weeks or months to set up a single integration.

The E2open B2B Client provides companies regardless of size and technical capability an easy way to integrate with customers and partners via E2open, significantly reducing the cost and complexity of B2B integration.

E2open is making the B2B Client available under an open source license, enabling customers or software developers to freely embed the client's rich B2B functionality into other solutions. A hardware appliance vendor and an ISV have already built solutions that leverage the B2B Client, evidence of the growing presence of E2open as a preferred integration option in the electronics industry.

"E2open offers companies of any size and capability a full range of integration options to make it as easy as possible to integrate with their customers and partners," said Mark Schenecker, E2open vice president of standards and interoperability. "Open source, fully supported software like the E2open B2B Client and easy-to-use tools for installation, testing and monitoring significantly reduce the integration burden for any company, especially smaller ones with limited technical resources, which makes the goal of 100 percent ecosystem integration possible."