The electronic commerce marketplace is still young enough that all of the likeliest suspects in the computer industry have yet to weigh in with their offerings. Hoping to nudge aside some smaller players, one of the big names &emdash; Silicon Graphics (Mountain View, Calif.; http://www.sgi.com) &emdash; has thrown its hat into the ring with its introduction of an integrated set of tools designed specifically for Web commerce site developers to create, manage and deploy commerce storefronts.
SGI hopes to generate interest in its new WebFORCE product by positioning it as an "all-in-one" solution. To that end, the company has integrated tools from a number of vendors into its e-comm toolkit.
WebFORCE uses the Cosmo suite of professional authoring tools to provide HTML, VRML and Java capabilities for creating commerce Web sites. The toolkit also includes EveryWare Development's Tango Enterprise rapid application development tools, which use a drag-and-drop environment to create applications that retrieve data from any ODBC database and dynamically generate an HTML Web page.
Keeping track of the items a customer intends to purchase is a key element to the success of any e- comm site. WebFORCE's shopping cart, utilizing EveryWare Develop-ment's Shopping Cart technology, allows customers to select any number of items from a site in their "virtual" shopping cart to make a purchase. If a customer exits the site for a period of time, the items in the shopping cart are stored and saved for the customer's return to the site. At the time of purchase, all items are calculated automatically, including the sales tax and shipping charges.
WebFORCE also includes the tools necessary to develop large, on-line catalogs using CADIS' Krakatoa Catalog Publishing technology to publish, search and retrieve content. Krakatoa's Intuitive Table of Contents technology, which organizes data into categories and sub-categories with association features, enables Web site developers to publish complex catalogs for users to search and query specific items they may be interested in. Open Market's SecureLink Executive system securely links storefronts to an in-house transaction system or a commerce service provider for secure purchase processing.
For large-scale, complex e-comm Web sites, SGI and its industry solution providers are working closely with such systems integrators as AT&T, Claremont Technology Group, CSC, EDS and WebFactory to ensure that these solutions are implemented in a proper and timely manner for each customer.
Finally, SGI's WebFORCE Developer's Program has been established to help businesses create and deploy compelling electronic commerce sites. Members of the program will receive access to Web tools, techniques and technologies, as well as exposure to SGI's customers and partners.