IBM Corp made a clutch of announcements at ISPCon in San Jose this week, prime among them the impending arrival of yet another electronic commerce software product, the Net.Commerce hosting server. This latest spurt from the Big Blue e-business fountain is an integrated software package aimed at ISPs and enables them to provide hosted electronic commerce services. Net.Commerce Hosting Server is a bundle of products based around IBM’s Net.Commerce Start, announced earlier this year (03/10/98) with a number of add-on features, among them, prefabricated store models and built-in customer performance tracking and reporting. IBM has also announced the Netfinity web server accelerator software for its Netfinity Intel-based NT and Unix servers. Aimed at ISPs, the software is said to be able to deliver up to 60% more page requests per minute that its competitors, based on a SPECweb96 benchmark carried out in July. The accelerator is available immediately, but only with Netfinity servers. The Net.Commerce hosting server package, along with its price, is promised by the end of the year.
