The Sun-Netscape Alliance has announced four relationships and a new service, all designed to establish the Alliance as an e- commerce vendor to be reckoned with. Andromedia, Net Perceptions, Selectica and Trilogy have teamed with the Alliance to help provide one-stop shopping to its customers. Selectica and Trilogy will provide guided online selling assistance, while Andromedia and Net Perceptions will handle personal profiling for the purposes of one-to-one marketing.
Meanwhile the Alliance itself has announced its Catalog Management Service, designed to help users of Netscape’s BuyerXpert integrate the application with catalog content from their suppliers. The service uses the Open Buying on the Internet (OBI) standard to accept catalog feeds as XML content. Catalog Management is the first of a series of services the Sun-Netscape Alliance plans to offer through its new Supplier Network. Now we can cross web-based procurement off the list of niches where start-ups may safely flourish without competition from software titans.
