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Electronic Commerce has been defined broadly as the transacting of business over the Web. More restrictively, the "business" is typically considered to be buying and selling, but in our broader research goals, we are trying to take a more holistic view to include several forms of interactions, including collaboration, auditing, advertising etc. Just as the 80's and early 90's were characterized by the businesses achieving greater efficiencies within their organization using information technology, the last half of this decade is seeing a new wave of increased efficiencies by extending the information technology to the Web, both to the trading partners, as well as to end consumers. While efficiencies lead to increased profitability, the Web offers other advantages, such as a greater reach, shorter term relationships, one-to-one marketing, re-intermediation, dis-intermediation etc. which are either difficult, or impossible to do in the traditional physical economy. Obviously, electronic commerce will first pass through the phase of "electronification" of current trading practices, and only later evolve into something radically different from its physical counterpart.
We at IBM Research are looking at the technological challenges faced in building the software that will enable our customers to conduct electronic commerce with their customers, and to evolve the software with the changing market, but more importantly, to anticipate the future and position IBM for it. The group builds on a strong track record of leading edge middleware applications, especially in the database (DB2 Parallel Edition and Web Access to Data) and Decision Support Applications (NASA Image Mining, Visual Data Mining and Advanced Scout). IBM already has a strong suite of products in this space, including Net.Commerce and Domino.Merchant (see CommercePoint for a complete listing of IBM's products in Electronic Commerce). We are attempting to enhance this portfolio with advanced research in, but not restricted to: |
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