Netscape Communications Corp has updated its Commerce Exchange suite of web commerce applications, adding a new application to the family of products. Commerce Exchange used to comprise merely Netscape’s ECXPert applications, but now includes ECXPert, ECXPert Enterprise and TradingXpert 2.0. The last of those is a new and is a replacement for the company’s former Developer Xpert product. Jim Atkins, director of Netscape’s Commerce Exchange group within the application products group says Developer Xpert was a product developed originally, like most of the Xpert family, by the ill-fated Actra Business Systems Inc joint venture with GE Information Systems that Netscape bought out in November 1997. The difference between the two, says Atkins, is that TradingXpert is out-of-the-box, whereas Developer Xpert enabled developers to create the functions the new software offers. Trading Xpert offers extranet services, linking trusted trading partners together. It includes templates for standard EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) transactions, but Atkins emphasizes that no knowledge of how EDI works is necessary to use the product. Other types of transactions, such as those in healthcare, as well as instant messaging to partners can also be achieved using this software, says Atkins. It comes with a runtime version of Netscape’s application server. Version 2.0 of ECXpert adds new scheduling and even-driven applications and the enterprise version of the product provides links into ERP applications, including SAP, Oracle and IBM MQSeries. Commerce Exchange, which goes head-to-head with similar e-commerce applications from the likes of Sterling Software and Harbinger Corp, ships today on Solaris, costing, $75,000 for ECXpert, $50,000 for ECXpert Enterprise, plus $30,000, $25,000 and $25,000 for the SAP, Oracle and MQSeries modules respectively. TradingXpert goes for $100,000. All prices are for two CPUs and unlimited users. Commerce Exchange will ship on NT in January and HP-UX a month later.
