December 29, 2000 Lately, the e-business industry has been spreading its wings, and setting its sights on Asia. According to the GartnerGroup, by 2003, online B2B transactions in the Asia-Pacific region will be worth $270 billion a year, about 20 percent of the world total. It appears that this statistic is making its rounds, and companies are responding.
This week, webMethods, a B2B integration solution provider, announced that it has expanded to the Asia Pacific market and now owns established operations in Australia, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. webMethods Asia Pacific operations are spearheaded by Thomas N. Erickson, webMethods' vice president of Asia Pacific Operations. Customers require a sales force and technical support group who understand local markets and offer the best quality and most reliable service, said Erickson. Expanding our Asia Pacific presence fulfills this need and supports the increased demand for webMethods B2Bi (business-to-business integration) solutions throughout the region.
The apparent success of webMethods' international initiative is illustrated by its growing list of Asia Pacific customers including NTT, NEC, Corporate Express, Legend Computer, Maxis, Singapore Dept. of Defense, Eastar Technology, ITTS, Asustek Computer and Volante.
Naturally, the emerging global e-business trend has spawned and accelerated the global e-business service and software companies. Two such companies, GlobalSight and NetCel360, are busy beefing up their service packages to accommodate the trend.
GlobalSight, which is an infrastructure software and strategy provider for Web globalization, announced this week that they have partnered with The Symbio Group, a company that provides e-business services for software and web companies entering multiple markets around the world.
We are very excited about our partnership with GlobalSight, which we believe offers one of the best globalization management systems in the industry, said Joseph Hsu, CEO of Symbio. By aligning with a leader in software for automating development of global e-business content, we can now provide our customers with end-to-end solution as a part of our client's global success. We are confident our clients can now realize significant success as they achieve their global e-business initiatives.
Perhaps the most specialized company for this trend is San Diego-based NetCel360, a pan-Asian e-business service provider. They, too, recently announced that they will be adding some perks to their package by introducing two new services. These services, which target multinational companies, established Internet companies and Asian conglomerates, are designed to accelerate companies' B2C and B2B e-commerce plans in the Asia Pacific region.
NetCel's new B2B package helps companies sell products and gain visibility through in-country distributors and dealers. This allows companies to benefit from centralized management of customer and product databases, marketing materials, and multi-lingual customer support, as well as inventory and fulfillment across multiple warehouses. NetCel360's bundling packages for B2C and B2B demonstrate our commitment to helping companies seamlessly make the transition from U.S.-centric e-business to global organization in one of the most culturally diverse and complex regions in the world, said Bill de Kruif, vice president of U.S. operations at NetCel360.
