The company’s supplier relationship management (SRM) version 6.0 was due to go into beta this quarter, but work has slipped and it is now expected to ship in the third quarter.

Meanwhile, in a bold move for a company struggling to find its feet after demand for its core B2B marketplace technology dried up almost completely, it is pitching the new 6.0 Conductor platform as a way of streamlining not only sourcing and supplier business processes, but also other business processes such as CRM.

The Pleasanton, California-based company said it has 11 early adopters of the Conductor platform that have been putting it through its paces as part of the beta program, and of these, four are using it for business process integration outside of Commerce One’s usual area – sourcing and procurement. The four are also new customers.

The foundation of the Conductor technology comes from Commerce One’s acquisition of Exterprise Inc in May 2001 in a stock swap worth about $78m. Exterprise offered software for building and managing collaborative business networks. But Commerce One said Conductor now represents a $250m investment by the company, suggesting much R&D work of its own has gone into it since the acquisition.

Bill Harmer, director of EMEA at Commerce One, said that Conductor should be thought of as a toolkit to enable companies to separate their business logic from the underlying technology. It supports web services standards and also integrates with the major enterprise application suites and EAI offerings.

Harmer said that Conductor has a software developer kit (SDK) to enable users to map, integrate and streamline their business processes. Later this quarter the company will launch pre-built templates: Demand Management; Invoice Matching and Conciliation, and Contract Compliance.

With the right templates Conductor will also act as replacement for the company’s marketplace platform, and it is working on migration tools to help users move across, though these are only expected in the second or third quarters.

But questions remain over the company’s future. For the quarter ended December 31, it posted a net loss of $279m, after sales slumped to just $19.5m, down from $55.9m in the same period a year earlier. Announcing its results it said 300 jobs would go by the end of this quarter.

The stock market has little faith in the company. Its market cap at the time of writing of $51.6m is probably less than its cash in hand. It had to opt for a one-for-ten reverse stock split in order to keep its share price above $1 and avoid a Nasdaq delisting, but at the time of writing its share price is still only $1.71. Just as alarmingly, it only had cash of $77.2m as of its latest results, down from $110m in the prior quarter. The company’s target is to hit operational profitability some time in the second half of 2003, according to CEO Mark Hoffman.

To raise some cash and focus on the areas it saw as holding most promise, in December 2002 the company offloaded its Commerce One.net e-marketplace to eScout, a move criticized by analyst firm Gartner, which said it would weaken Commerce One’s position in the procurement and SRM sectors.

In any event, the company accepts that it has hard work ahead of it, and is attempting to sell the Conductor platform beyond its usual sourcing and procurement customers. We have a healthy portion of realism, said Harmer, but companies will find this product attractive because it enables them to separate their underlying technology from their business processes, and get more value from their existing investments.

Source: Computerwire