B2B eCommerce Industry Faces Serious Hurdle, According to WIZNET; Getting Product Information Online May Be Y2K-like Problem For Industry.

Business Editors

DELRAY BEACH, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 30, 2000

The process of placing literally millions of products and services on to the Internet is considerably more difficult than initially anticipated, and may result in a serious delay in the roll out of many business-to-business electronic trading networks, according to a Florida-based company that specializes in managing Internet content.

After working with numerous clients, officials with WIZNET, Inc., conclude that although many online trading exchanges have been announced, almost none have addressed the issue of how they will get product information - in some cases catalogs that contain millions of intricate parts - onto the Internet. Some companies, including many of the high-profile net market makers that are garnering enormous attention, are having to resort to manually keying in large amounts of data, a process that is time-intensive and error-prone. In many cases placing one catalog onto the Web may take as long as three or four months.

"We've been seeing a lot of announcements about new electronic marketplaces, but so far, there aren't many products online," said Steve Attanasio, president & CEO, WIZNET. "That's because no one really thought about how hard it would be to put the descriptions online, and no one wants to talk about it."

According to Aberdeen Group, a Boston-based Internet research group, the traditional conversion methods "significantly limit the number of organizations that can participate in e-commerce, increase content development and maintenance costs...and limit opportunities for product differentiation and branding."

"We are training a new generation of buyers that are concerned with nothing more than price," said Mark Walsh, president and CEO, VerticalNet, in a recent article in InfoWorld. "But we believe that content and brand will once again be king. The Internet does not change the way we do business, it just accelerates it. Brands will become a friend during a confusing time."

Additionally, Aberdeen feels that on-line purchasing provides real saving benefits to the buying organization. Administrative costs are reduced by up to 90 percent, inventory costs by up to 25-50 percent, and purchasing costs by 15-25 percent or more by eliminating off-contract purchases and improving processing efficiencies. Recently, the Gartner Group predicted that the annual B2B electronic commerce revenues will reach nearly $7.3 trillion by 2004. About $1.5 trillion of that will be specifically for eProcurement.

Earlier this year, buzzsaw.com hired WIZNET to place much of its customers' content onto the Internet. VerticalNet also recently awarded WIZNET a contract to put as many as 80,000 catalogs onto the Web each year over the next three years. Currently, WIZNET is partnering with INTESA, a joint venture between Petroleos of Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to create Latin America's first B2B e-commerce portal.

WIZNET is currently using proprietary scanning technologies to address this problem, but Mr. Attanasio feels other Internet content management companies need to do the same in order to ensure that this issue is resolved. WIZNET-developed technologies allow for thousands of catalogs to be placed onto the Internet in only a matter of days; however, at this time it is the only company that is managing the content at this processing rate.

WIZNET incorporates three business units: WIZnet.com, Content Management Services and Channel Partner Alliances. WIZnet.com is a web-based marketplace exchange for searching and sourcing 45,000 catalogs containing more than 15 million industrial products. Content Management offers a suite of services to vertical and other business-to-business e-commerce market makers. The company teams with global leaders to private label WIZnet.com business functionality.