Commerce One Inc, fresh from the announcement of its initial public offering this week, has launched version 5.0 of its BuySite web-based business-to-business procurement software, incorporating tools from Cognos Inc and Extensity Inc. The company has also announced a hosted edition of BuySite, aimed at small to medium businesses that until now have been excluded from using a product whose price tag ranges from $500,000 to $2.5m.
However, the company has not straightened out the business models for the hosted edition and could not give us any guidelines as to the price – except from the (obvious) statement that it will be dramatically reduced from the cost of the enterprise edition. The company believes that ISPs and commerce service providers will settle on a combination of a monthly fee for a certain number of transactions, with any additional transactions charged separately.
BuySite is one half of its Commerce Chain product set. The other one is the supplier-side MarketSite set of software and services that processes orders and payments generated by BuySite. The Walnut, Creek, California-based company has made various changes to the product since its previous release which shipped in November. The addition of Extensity’s tool enables employees to prepare and file expense reports, while Cognos brings OLAP and data mining tools to BuySite that enables managers to make more informed decisions about their purchases, according to the company. Apart from the addition of the Cognos and Extensity technology, Commerce One has also added the ability to book tickets via the Sabre travel system and added tax and freight calculations using software from TaxWare and TanData. Both the BuySite 5.0 enterprise and hosted editions are available now.
