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security and authentication;
content management and publica- any place. Yet businesses still need to ry requirements of continuously avail-
tion; be sensitive to local requirements able, highly flexible, rapidly change-
reliable systems, messaging, and because of cultural sensitivities, regu- able software that is at the same time
data; latory differences, and infrastructure perfectly reliable and stable calls for
complex interactions and transac- capabilities. Strategic thinking is even innovative techniques and tools.
tions; more important when goals involve Instead, most implementations today
business model implementation more players and more rounds of depend on energy, skill, and luck.
and business process enactment; interaction, as is common when the Rather than buying and running a
and supply web becomes more complicat- piece of software, a firm can now access
distributed processing and distrib- ed, and many alternative business an application through an application
uted data. deals are possible. service provider (ASP) or business
There has been a rebirth of interest process outsourcer (BPO) over the Net,
agents that can react at any time from trustworthy. Meeting the contradicto-
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High-end sites may handle hundreds in game theory. New approaches to and use it as a short-term transaction or
of thousands of hits per minute, pre- marketing, such as targeting individual as part of a long-term relationship.
sent and update catalogs
with many millions of
items, collect tens of giga-
bytes of behavioral data per
day, run hundreds of sepa-
rate processes or businesses
simultaneously, and utilize
thousands of processors to
carry the load.
Technical changes are
enabling new ways of doing
business. As the cost and
delay of messaging become
Although dynamic access to
services (including discov-
ery, ad hoc workflows, and
late binding) is a staple of
research in distributed
computing and network-
ing, only now are business
cases starting to close and
enormous bets being
placed. Once specific ser-
vices are easily outsourced,
more complicated multi-
company projects and vir-
As the cost a nd d e la y of
m e ssa g ing b e com e ne g lig ib le ,
ne g otia tion a nd com p e titive
b id d ing ca n b e the norm ra the r
tha n the e x ce p tion.
negligible, negotiation and competitive customers at specific moments based tual enterprises will be feasible.
bidding can be the norm rather than on very recent behavior or when they The technical demands will be
the exception. Web technologies like are physically near a store, become enormous—and exciting. Researchers
authentication, standard messaging, profitable when new types of informa- are extending the boundaries of the
and rapid data sharing already support tion (such as customer clickstreams) possible in many areas of computing.
spontaneous, secure, and multiparty are available, but first patterns must be In coming issues, this column will
interactions among businesses. Groups extracted from terabytes of data (some examine these stresses and their likely
of consumers can band together as high-end companies already apply or hoped-for solutions.
easily as guilds of sellers, with the help rudimentary forms of this analysis).
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of discovery technologies and online
databases. Innovative forms of pay- Re -e nvisioning Softw a re
ment and finance are being intro- De ve lop m e nt
duced to meet new needs. New inter- The accelerating tempo of business
mediary services will add value by and the pressure to get to market
accumulating and analyzing informa- quickly are also revolutionizing the
REFEREN CE
1. The Internet Economy Indicators,
Indicators Report, June 1999, available
online at http://www.internetindicators.
com/features.html.
tion and using it to simplify technical way commercial software is built and Stuart Feldman is director of the IBM Institute
and business problems. Intelligent managed. Some companies revise their
agents will finally earn their keep by entire business model every six
for Advanced Commerce, and manages a
research staff of more than 80 researchers
in network-related technologies including
e-commerce, Internet media, and antivirus
systems. Feldman is an IEEE Fellow, an
ACM Fellow, a member of Phi Beta Kappa
and Sigma Xi, and is Chair of ACM
SIGecom. He recently joined the editorial
board of IEEE Internet Computing.
providing such services.
months—faster than they can redesign
Of course, good business tech- their software by traditional means.
niques are still important, and their Such firms must balance compressed
effects are amplified by Web tech- software development with customer
nologies. The marketplace is now satisfaction. On the other hand, when
truly global and simultaneous, with significant sums are at risk, parts of
buyers, sellers, intermediaries, and the application must be thoroughly
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MAY • JUNE 2000
83