Eqos launches Collaborator Exchange to offer eMarketplaces differentiation
12 October 2000
Eqos, which provides the world's most sophisticated technology architecture for collaborative working, has taken a significant lead within the e-Marketplace space with the launch today (12 October) of Collaborator Exchange, a new platform which will enable B2B trading exchanges to provide added value to their subscribers, in the way of improved business efficiency.
According to Mike Quinn, joint founder and managing director of Eqos, it is no longer sufficient for e-Marketplaces to simply provide a common meeting ground on the Internet for business related to e-procurement and auctions.
"The focus is shifting from exchanges concerned with finding subscribers and buying products at the lowest price, to operators looking for benefits which will integrate business processes between their members and help them conduct business more efficiently.
Collaborator Exchange is the first many-to-many platform designed to extract, utilize and integrate, for competitive advantage, information from across the business trading community. The hallmark of a successful e-Marketplace will be the maturity of its collaborative processes and the ability to address the needs of hundreds of different companies and the hundreds of thousands of individuals within those companies.
"Eqos' strength is its many-to-many architecture and the emergence of these trading exchanges opens up a whole new marketing opportunity for us," says Mike Quinn.
In its latest report on e-Commerce applications, AMR Research assert, "the Collaboration layer is what ultimately differentiates one exchange from another." Simon Pollard, Service Director and Vice President, European Research, AMR Research, states, "the new phenomenon of Trading Exchanges offer the opportunity and threat of brave new ways of working under many to many, peer to peer business models. Such models are fundamentally different to the traditional process world and therefore require an approach to application architecture that is equivalently innovative."
Collaborator Exchange provides the sophisticated platform with which exchanges can create differentiation by building their own "customized" collaborative applications, with the added bonus that they will work with members' own processes and existing IT systems.
"Exchange members will not want to give up their own highly developed processes and go for a generic one size fits all," confirms Mike Quinn. "so Eqos Collaborator Exchange has been designed using industry standards such as XML so that it can seamlessly integrate and sit within an exchange and work with any existing systems. And because of its flexibility, applications can be easily modified in the future to meet the inevitable changing demands of buyers and sellers without the need for costly recoding."
Based on the latest v1.3 of Eqos' award winning Collaborator system, Collaborator Exchange features advanced tools so a company's precise data and processes can be presented in an endless choice of layouts using an advanced XML and XSL-based form facility. Customized layouts, with background graphics and other advanced effects can be accommodated as well as the more traditional tables formats. This ensures that companies can have data presented in their preferred house style irrespective of how it may be presented by the companies with whom they are collaborating.
"The volume and sheer complexity of processes that are involved in this new trading model is daunting as the collaborative business processes will be unique to each company," adds Mike Quinn. "The complexity is complicated further by the fact that the type of information accessed from the partner's computer systems will also vary. From the outset Eqos technology was designed to tackle these challenges head on and we have succeeded."
As the transmission of information becomes more streamlined, Collaborator Exchange has built in a high level of security within the framework of the application. In addition, to work even more effectively within a global marketplace, Collaborator Exchange has been configured to support key languages English, French, German and Italian, and additional "local" languages can be added.
Notes to Editors:
Eqos Systems Ltd
Eqos Systems Ltd is the developer of the world's first development platform designed for B2B collaborative working. Headquartered in the UK, with offices in the US, Eqos already has alliances with many of the world's leading edge companies, including Microsoft, Andersen Consulting, Price Waterhouse Coopers, and Deloitte Consulting.
For further information, please contact:
Linda Laderman or Anne Lomax
Laderman PR
5 Portland Place
London W1B 1PW
Phone +44 (0)20 7436 6676
Fax +44 (0)20 7580 0555
Email annel@ladermanpr.co.uk
