Gartner Sets Industry Standard For Real-Time Monitoring For B2B E-Business.

Gartner Group Inc. (NYSE: IT and ITB) announced a new standard for measuring business-to-business (B2B) e-business. Gartner eMetrix powered by InfoRay is a real-time monitor that enables e-businesses to react to critical changes across all business and technology areas. Gartner eMetrix powered by InfoRay provides decision-makers with real-time views into vital data housed in traditionally disparate sources such as data warehouses, enterprise resource planning systems and corporate databases. The immediate metrics on e-business processes helps to prevent critical delays and keeps businesses running at Internet speed.

eMetrix is a strategic monitoring and measurement service and software tool that is customizable for each individual enterprise's B2B operations. eMetrix monitors and reports on every leg of an e-business operation in real time, sending alerts to CEOs, business unit managers and CFOs when a major business opportunity is in jeopardy due to timing across the entire value chain - from supplier to customer. eMetrix monitors the efficiency of the supply chain, customer loyalty, collaboration among suppliers, business partners and customers, e-procurement and B2B e-commerce. The customizable solution is applicable to any enterprise using any legacy system as well as any type of application and middleware. eMetrix addresses the most strategic to the most tactical aspects of e-business and, because it readily follows the integration of legacy systems, it provides the knowledge that executives need today.

Gartner projects B2B e-business to grow into a $7.29 trillion industry by 2004. The complexities of transforming a global business into a thriving B2B are derived from the two challenges. One, enterprises are combining multiple legacy systems on different platforms to enable e-commerce, automated supply chain management and real-time inventory control. Moreover, large communities combine business partners, suppliers, internal personnel and even customers that may all interact with data warehouse information to add knowledge to accelerate or slow the speed of the B2B e-business.

According to Gartner research, the opportunity to improve metrics for e-business management is extensive. Of 206 companies recently surveyed by Gartner, less than 25 percent had implemented new metrics for e-business and more than 30 percent were not measuring e-business initiatives at all. The remaining respondents still rely on traditional business and technology metrics.

Recent missed opportunities that eMetrix is designed to address include the case of the manufacturer that missed a major Halloween retail opportunity because the supply chain did not meet the needs of the manufacturing plant in time. A major automotive retailer missed the target sales for a specific car model because the size of the consumer demand was not properly fed into the automotive manufacturing schedule. Most notably, holiday e-tailers that missed December deadlines for toy shipments due to inventory and logistics problems could have salvaged seasonal profits had they received immediate status alerts when problems first began. Without the real-time B2B metrics, all of these businesses were unaware of supply chain issues until it was too late,; causing lost revenue and, more importantly, lost customers.

"We're providing our clients with a forward-looking view of their businesses rather than an analysis of what has already happened," says Al Lill, Gartner's vice president of E-business Intelligence Services. "This capability is unmatched by any other market research firm and enables managers to identify their e-business challenges in real time and immediately put Gartner's strategic analysis into practice."