ELECTRONIC COMMERCE UPDATE

September/October€1996

End-to-End Electronic Commerce

IBM (Armonk, N.Y.) (www.ibm.com) has launched CommercePOINT, a family of products and services designed to provide end-to-end electronic buying and selling on the World Wide Web.

CommercePOINT allows consumers and merchants to make electronic trades with the security of an over-the-counter transaction. Smaller businesses and upscale retailers can create on-line shopping environments that reflect a more personalized, service-oriented experience; mass merchandisers and wholesalers can offer products in virtual marketplaces that link distribution, inventory, delivery, and other systems; and global partners such as banks, stores, warehouses and transport companies can blend core operating functions into one network powered by the Internet and intranets.

CommercePOINT features include:

Infrastructure for SET-based credit/debit card transactions - from consumer to merchant to bank; from purchase to payment to reconciliation. SET (Secure Electronic Transaction) is a new standard for on-line payments jointly developed by technology companies and financial institutions.

Available as complete end-to-end services based on a monthly fee, or as plug-in modules and applications that customers install and run themselves.
· Creates electronic "smart catalogs" that continually rearrange their contents based on consumers priorities and preferences.

Personal agents, digital certificates (see sidebar at right), digital wallets (to store digital ID cards), IBM Crypto-lope containers, data mining, and Java applets.

Gives large companies and governments real-time Web-based transactional connections to crucial suppliers, vendors, and essential business partners.

Plugs into existing networks, databases and applications. CommercePOINT works with widely used technologies built on open computing and networking standards.

CommercePOINT is organized into three categories of Internet commerce: business-to-consumer; business-to-business; and Internet infrastructure, which includes security and encryption. They are available as stand-alone solutions or as customized, mix-n-match applications.

Know Who You're Doing Business With

IBM will license Entrust, Nortel's (Mississauga, Ontario, Canada) (www.nortel.com) family of security software that helps buyers and sellers verify identities over the Internet. IBM plans to include the features of Entrust in its CommercePOINT products.

Nortel's Entrust is a set of security software that gives Internet users a way to identify each other using electronic "certificates" based on a technology called public-key cryptography. This technology will permit Entrust to integrate with the other open technologies that comprise IBM's Internet infrastructure and global support operations.

Electronic certificates provide a means to authenticate the identity of each party in an electronic transaction. Certificates are digital credentials issued by a trusted organization through a certification authority, which authenticates the owner's identity and set of privileges for specific applications and services. As users are added or removed from the system, the certification authority manages the issuance of new certificates and revocations of certificates belonging to users who are no longer authorized to use the application.

Electronic Commerce Update Search Engine

Click here to return to Table of Contents for the Electronic Commerce Update September/October issue.