Commerce One is scheduled to announce this week that it is
extending its SAP AG partnership to include Sun Microsystems, which
would offer its MarketSet business-to-business marketplace
environment for Sun's Solaris operating system.
SAP officials added that the company was free to negotiate a deal
with PeopleSoft that is similar to its SAP agreement.
No plans are in place, but PeopleSoft is in talks with Commerce One
and others for arrangements in which PeopleSoft would provide
application services for marketplaces, said Kerry Lamson,
PeopleSoft's vice-president of e-business strategy and
marketing
For the next phase of their partnership, Commerce One and SAP will
port their joint MarketSet marketplace platform and Commerce One's
Buyer product to Sun systems. The MarketSet platform is designed to
handle direct procurement, supply-chain management, and real-time
collaboration.
The relationship with Sun will be a boon to Commerce One because it
will open up the vendor to Unix customers, said Lance Travis, an
analyst at AMR Research, in Boston. "Commerce One needs to do
something if it wants to remain an independent company," Travis
said.
Travis added that an alliance between Commerce One and PeopleSoft
would allow Commerce One to focus on PeopleSoft's customer base for
human resources modules without threatening SAP.
A CommerceOne customer said that his company chose the solution for
the Solaris platform because participants needed assurances that
their internal enterprise environments would handle the data and
transactions of the exchange.
Commerce One shareholders meet this week to consider a
reorganisation to keep half of its stake in automotive
business-to-business exchange Covisint.
Covisint serves as a reminder of the importance of suppliers,
analysts said. The demand for Covisint offerings has been sluggish,
and it uses only 50 of Commerce One's 1,500 service employees
despite earlier predictions that it would need thousands more, said
Patrick Walravens, equity analyst at Lehman Brothers.
s a result, demand for consultants has exceeded supply, resulting
in too many service personnel. "If [suppliers] were all hooking up
to the Covisint marketplace, you would need a lot more than 50
working on it," he said.
Exchanges such as Covisint "are only a small part of Commerce One's
customer base, so the maths used by Lehman do not accurately
reflect our utilisation," a Commerce One spokesman said.