Lisbon, Portugal April 25, 2001 At the SAP international e-business conference this week, SAPMarkets, the exchange company of SAP AG, announced a strategy for private exchange solutions that will expand the benefits of integration and collaboration within an enterprise and across business boundaries by leveraging existing systems, especially in heterogeneous environments. Unlike a public e-marketplace, a private exchange is a collaborative environment that is owned, operated and managed by a single company. SAPMarkets is performing the lead role for private exchanges within the SAP group of companies.
One of the greatest challenges facing companies is the need for their ecosystems to integrate the most efficient business processes to drive profitability. However, integrating numerous point-to-point and heterogeneous connections is very expensive. By utilizing a private exchange, a company is able to manage these major integration roadblocks while, at the same time, realizing new benefits from sharing collaborative business processes among the companies in their ecosystem.
"Private exchanges extend the integration of the enterprise to include collaboration within entire business ecosystems," said Hasso Plattner, CEO of SAPMarkets Inc. "Through our partnership with Commerce One, we drive business processes across boundaries, regardless of location and systems involved. In this way, companies will be able to achieve substantial improvements in efficiency, both within their enterprise and through collaboration with business partners. This represents one of the key industry developments that will revolutionize business software."
The SAPMarkets private exchange strategy is based upon MarketSet 2.0, the jointly developed product from SAPMarkets and Commerce One Inc.
The SAPMarkets private exchange solution delivers B2B processes that allow companies to support their e-business strategy by combining existing and new applications. "The power of the private exchange lies in streamlining and improving efficiency in trading relationships, including those with resellers, distributors and logistics providers," said Bruce Richardson, senior vice president, research, AMR Research. "With this announcement, SAPMarkets is now delivering an integrated, comprehensive, real-world private exchange environment for companies seeking to achieve these benefits."
Private exchanges from SAPMarkets are designed to help a company to streamline operations and improve efficiencies throughout their demand and supply networks. The private exchange incorporates relationships with customers, suppliers, distributors and logistics providers throughout the product life cycle, from product conception to production, sales, order fulfillment and customer service. To achieve this, the private exchange delivers an integration hub and the necessary sets of B2B processes for product life-cycle management, supply chain management and procurement. In addition, the private exchange provides the analytics of exchange-based B2B processes.
