Commerce One signs up Sun
- Posted:
- 12:25 26 Jun 2001
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.
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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.
