Oracle Offers Collaboration To Hubs

Oracle next week will roll out a hosted service that lets e-marketplaces add collaboration features.

Oracle Product Development Exchange (OPDX) promises to let e-marketplace operators move beyond basic matchmaking, said Jeremy Burton, Oracle's senior vice president of products and services marketing.

"There is more to B2B than buying and selling, it's also providing robust collaborative capabilities," Burton said. "If you are a pure marketplace that can only provide buying and selling, you won't survive."

AMR analyst David Caruso agrees. "Companies are looking to trading exchanges to provide the collaborative tools they need," he said. "There's a huge upside for enterprises to use these technologies."

Fibermarket.com, the eight-month-old exchange serving the recovered fiber and paper industry (InternetWeek, July 31), is among those looking to move beyond basic trading. The company plans to use Oracle's OPDX to let its members share intellectual property and other proprietary information.

"In order to compel buyers and sellers to come to our site, we need a more complete solution," said Robert Foushee, Fibermarket.com's director of development and strategy. "Part of it is buying and selling, but we need to offer integration paths" geared to companies that want to use Fibermarket.com to share information.

Foushee said Fibermarket.com will roll out collaborative capabilities later this year. The online exchange will also consider launching other Net markets aimed at associated industries with an eye toward providing collaborative features on a wider scale.

"We could see moving into package design, where we could offer companies the capabilities they need to put a package together--from determining the package's strength to the type of logo or printing that would appear," Foushee said.

OPDX uses Oracle's Internet File System and 8i database as a centralized repository where collaborative information can be stored.

The initial release will support the storage and transmission of intellectual property. Forthcoming modules, to be rolled out within the next six months, will add support for logistics, sales leads and supply chain management.

Oracle also plans to add design and videoconferencing collaboration capabilities from mechanical design vendor PTC and conferencing supplier WebEx respectively.

OPDX, available to exchanges as a hosted platform, is priced at $995 per user.