E-Commerce Seeks Wider Audience
May 17, 1999
Award: Business-to-Business E-Commerce Solution
It seems that all areas of e-commerce are on an continuous growth path as more and more business is taking place on the Internet. The big business-to-consumer storefront solutions have received most of the attention, but the long-term potential for business-to-business (B2B) solutions is even more impressive. Organizations of all shapes and sizes are realizing the cost and efficiency benefits from automating their supply chains and linking their procurement, order entry and invoice and billing systems to those of their partners, suppliers, manufacturers and distributors. So far, most of the action comes from large enterprise shops, but small- and medium-sized businesses are beginning to join in as well. As a result, we've seen a number of e-commerce products come to market in the past year.
The winner in this category, IBM Corp.'s Net.Commerce, is one of the most powerful, full-featured and versatile products on the market. Instead of providing a turnkey, out-of-box solution, it offers a toolkit approach to setting up a B2B system. For an enterprise with heavy-duty e-commerce needs, Net.Commerce provides top-notch extensibility, connectivity and integration with ERP (Enteprise Resource Planning) systems, EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) integration and support for a variety of standards, including OBI (Open Buying on the Internet), SET (Secure Electronic Transaction) and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), COM/DCOM (Component Object Model/Distributed COM) and Enterprise JavaBeans.
Alternatively, Netscape's suite of EXCpert, BuyerXpert and SellerXpert provides an impressive degree of out-of-box functionality. Like Net.Commerce, it boasts tremendous standards support for EDI, OBI, CORBA, X.509 digital certificates, SSL, S/MIME and RSA encryption.
Microsoft Corp.'s Site Server Commerce Edition is another toolkit system with a wealth of functionality and a well-conceived pipeline architecture model for business processes. For shops using NT and Microsoft Internet Information Server for their e-commerce infrastructure, Site Server Commerce Edition is a strong offering.
--Richard Hoffman
Award: E-Commerce Host Service Provider
Today's buzzwords for e-commerce are performance and support, with security not far behind. AT&T/CERFnet leads the e-commerce service provider pack in all three areas. Although its services are primarily targeted at midsized businesses, it provides the kind of feature-rich, application-integrated services touted by CSPs (Commerce Service Provider) eyeing much larger merchants.
AT&T/CERFnet is among a handful of CSPs promising to keep peak loads under 50 percent of capacity. It has one of the largest round-the-clock helpdesk staffs, as well as a breadth of network peering that leaves other CSPs dripping with envy.
AT&T/CERFnet's offering includes a packed wardrobe of payment systems and services, such as online tax calculation, multicurrency support, bill presentment, online credit-card processing, buyer notification of shipment, membership tracking, and purchase order and invoice support.
AT&T/CERFnet is also attuned to security concerns, providing several layers of fraud checks and the kind of old-world physical security so often neglected in the boomtown CSP market. Server and network redundancy, along with cross-server, dynamic load-balancing, round out this picture of an e-commerce service provider intent on quality and peak performance.
Honorable mentions in the CSP category go to GTE Internetworking and IBM Corp., both of whom win high marks for performance and reliability. We also see great potential in the merger of feature-rich EDS services and network-rich MCI WorldCom's CSP.
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--Christy Hudgins Bonafield
Award: Web-Content-Management Software
Being able to fire up a tool and have it identify all trouble spots on your Web site is a Web administrator's dream. This past year, we reviewed five Web-content-management software products. Tetranet Softeware's Linkbot Pro outperformed all others and was quite a value, priced at less than $250. Its user interface offers clearly displayed information about individual links and pages, courtesy of an Explorer-like interface. Linkbot Pro also provides unique information, such as download times for each Web component. It highlights various access speeds, including modem, ISDN and T1 rates, HTML-syntax checking, and image thumbnails. This entire features set puts Linkbot Pro ahead of the competition and simplifies tracking broken links and orphaned files.
Runners up in this category include WebTrends Corp.'s WebTrends Enterprise Suite 2.1 and Microsoft Corp's Site Server Standard Edition. Although these products packed a punch, their higher price tags and sometimes difficult-to-use interfaces placed them behind Linkbot Pro.
--Gregory Yerxa
Award: Web-Management Suite
Managing a Web site effectively is a piece of cake with Microsoft Corp.'s Site Server Standard Edition, a full-blown Web-site-management suite in a single package that costs less that $1,200. With features such as knowledge-management tools, publishing services, content management and transactional analysis in the Commerce Edition, it's easy to see why we like Site Server so much.
Working exclusively with Windows NT, Site Server outperformed the competition when importing our test server logs. And it went the extra mile by breaking down log information based on domain name information--both U.S. and international domains--and using well-known ISP information. Site Server didn't stop there--it highlighted the leading requests from each top-level domain.
Convenient wizards assist in most set up and management aspects, from configuring the SQL data store to data importing and report writing. Site Server's GUI lets you customize the reports' look and feel. Rich reports can include other data stores, creating a complete enterprise Web-site-management suite.
--Gregory Yerxa
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Web-Server Load-Balancing Solution
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Winner
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Web Server Director Pro 2xFE 5.12, RADWARE, (888) 234-5763, (201) 512-9771
www.radware.com
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Finalists
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F5 BIG/ip LB, F5 Labs, (888) 88-BIGIP, (206) 505-0800
www.f5.com
Hydra 5000 1.3 (now shipping 2.2), HydraWeb Technologies, (212) 809-5900
www.hydraweb.com
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Award: Web Server Load-Balancing Solution
Not to be confused with basic load-balancing, switch-based products, Web server load-balancing solutions are typically router- or bridge-based. Although services between the two categories are nearly identical, we chose to distinguish them in two separate categories for our awards. RADWARE's Web Server Director Pro proved to be the best load-balancing solution, reflecting significant improvements in managebility, configuration and performance.
Perhaps its most impressive feature is the flexible failover mechanism. While load-balancers have traditionally been limited to an active or passive failover role, the Web Server Director Pro is capable of load-balancing in both capacities. For example, with a completely redundant setup consisting of two Web Server Director Pros, each Web Server Director Pro can serve as the active role in one Web farm, while backing up another. In this way, you can evenly distribute your workload across two Web Server Director Pros rather than have one box sit idle, waiting for a failure. Although this may not be necessary for all networks, administrators can be assured of a reliable failover mechanism if they need it.
Runners-up HydraWeb Technologies' HydraWeb 5000 1.3 and F5 Labs' BIG/ip3 1.8 both exhibited blazing performance numbers in our tests, but lacked in management and redundancy capabilities.
--Gregory Yerxa
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