IBM, Oracle expand e-commerce services

By Jacqueline Emigh

In the clothing category, for example, items can be searched for by elements such as color of garment, or style.

The personal shopping assistant also suggests accessories like shoes and belts for various garments. If a Web shopper finds a particular piece of clothing appealing, he or she can place it on a wish list for future gift purchases by family and friends. But if they think they want to buy it, the browser keeps it in the user's online "shopping basket" for up to 12 hours. The assistant will also alert users to "best buys" or good deals available based on the user's list of preferences.

World Avenue and World Distributor are both open on the Web (see contacts). IBM is planning commercial availability of the personal shopping assistant and two new data mining tools for the first quarter of 1997.

Oracle's Apollo for selling on Web

Oracle's big Internet World announcement was the release of the beta version of a Java-based merchant server, code-named Project Apollo, designed to let retailers-from small shop owners to large investment firms-set up "secure" virtual storefronts on the World Wide Web.

Along with a commerce server from Oracle, Project Apollo belongs to a new category of "cartridges" being created by Oracle and third-party developers in accordance with Oracle's new network computing architecture (NCA), according to company officials.

About 70 NCA cartridges are already being created, in Java as well as other programming languages such as C/C++, says Mark Jarvis, vice-president of server marketing for Oracle.

During a product demo, Jarvis showed the journalists and analysts how Apollo can be used in conjunction with cartridges from Taxware and Verifone to market goods to consumers over the Web, calculate tax, and obtain credit card authorization.

Jarvis says that, beyond working with an X.509 security server cartridge-also from a third-party vendor-Apollo provides security on several other levels, including SSL and a choice of data encryption standard (DES) or RSA (whose name is derived from RSA Data Security, which created the type of encryption found in Netscape) encryption.

During a panel discussion at the close of the event, Beatriz Infante, senior vice-president of Internet and media products, said that Oracle expects Apollo to receive 60 to 70 percent of its use from smaller merchants running single-processor Intel systems.

Infante predicts that as their online business grows, many customers will migrate to larger store sites with assistance from systems integrators. Some of the customers beta testing Apollo include Fidelity Investments, EDS, Burlington Coats, Motorola in the United Kingdom, and Telefonica in Spain.

Infante says a company policy prevents her from giving a specific price for Apollo prior to its release. But, she notes, the wide distribution made possible by the Web is giving rise to new, generally lower, software prices.

Also during the press conference, David Spenhoff, director of product marketing for JavaSoft at Sun, said that JavaSoft has worked closely with Oracle on the development of Oracle's 20 Java-based products. Oracle also added its support for Java with the announcement of J/SQL, or embedded SQL for Java, thin-client JDBC, and Java-enabled database servers.

Contact: IBM, World Avenue and World Distributor,
Web site: http://www.ibm.com/commercepoint
Oracle, Tel: 415-506-7000.

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TCP Online February 1997 Issue