Component-based frameworks for e-commerce

61 F orward-thinking companies have come to realize that e-commerce is neither just a buy-side nor sell-side packaged application. They have learned that mission-critical business opportunities abound and they must implement many e-commerce initiatives along the way to building the virtual corporation that thrives in the Digital Economy. To them, e-commerce is an infrastructure for a whole new way of doing business. They have learned if they extend their business processes across company boundaries and integrate them with their suppliers' and customers' business processes something totally new starts to happen. E-commerce applications can be categorized into the four major groupings shown in Figure 1. On the sell side of most companies, I-Market applications include online catalog management, order management , trading communities, marketing and advertising, while Customer Care applications involve customer self-service, customer relationship management and business intelligence support. On the buy side, Vendor Management Systems automate the procurement of indirect operating resources including sourc-ing, bid/ask buying and custom supplies catalogs. Extended Supply Chain Management includes collab-orative forecasting and planning, scheduling and logistics. These are general categories, and some companies such as GE and Home Depot already have identified more than 70 e-commerce opportunities for competitive advantage and business concept innovation. To achieve coherence and manage the complexity and change inherent in multiple e-commerce applications , an overarching structure is needed—an application architecture. Joined electronically, companies operating in the Digital Economy must share a common foundation for integrating their unique business processes and embrace the software component paradigm as the way forward. Their core business processes are embedded in legacy, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and client/server systems. In order to retarget these internal systems outward, common inter-enterprise application functions are needed. As shown in the inner oval of Figure 1, information boundaries, workflow/process management , trading services, searching The software paradigms of component-based frameworks for e-commerce promise to provide companies with the speed and agility they need to compete in Internet time.