By Rachel Chalmers
Bluestone Software Inc is poised to announce a new product line called Total-e-Business, which it describes as a complete e- business platform. Senior VP of marketing John Capobianco explains that Gartner Group analyst Dale Plummer has defined the e-business platform as a new category of software, requiring an application server, integration services, content management and personalization capabilities. Total-e-Business has all that and more, Capobianco claims. We’ve taken it a little farther, he told ComputerWire. The extras include a set of components: shopping carts, catalog management, taxation and shipping modules, storefront templates and credit card verification. Behind them there’s a personalization engine for profiling users of the system and full content management for aggregating and publishing information, with facilities to age and purge data once it’s out of date.
It’s all built on Bluestone’s integration server, itself based on XML and Java server pages (JSP), running on the SapphireWeb application server. Everything’s based on open standards – Enterprise Java Beans as well as XML and JSP. The APIs have been built with modularity in mind, meaning that if customers already have a content management system they’re happy with, it should drop right into the Bluestone software. What we’ve created is something that’s quite unique in the marketplace, Capobianco claims. He says Allaire Corp is on the right track but doesn’t have a product ready for release. Broadvision and Vignette are close behind, but in Capobianco’s opinion, no one else is even close.
He credits two Bluestone customers, HealthAccess.com and Strategic Weather Services, with being the impetus behind the development of Total-e-Business. They were early customers who came to us with a lot of issues, he says. Both companies wanted a single source for their application server, content management, personalization and integration. They insisted that if Bluestone didn’t have the technology, it should develop it. Bluestone bowed to their demands. As a result, the company’s e-business platform should make its commercial debut in December 1999.
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