A group of major companies including Hewlett-Packard Co, Apple Computer Inc, Sun Microsystems Inc, Lockheed Corp and the Bank of America subsidiary of BankAmerica Corp, is expected to come together with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory this week to announce the first formalised business community on the Internet, the Wall Street Journal reports. By September, the aim is that CommerceNet should enable users to buy goods and services and do banking on-line. CommerceNet could also offer Electronic Data Interchange services, enabling companies to place orders with suppliers, bid on contracts, and also use the network to collaborate in the design of products. CommerceNet has an initial investment of $12m, with half of the funding coming from the US government. The organisers say that CommerceNet will start life with about 50 major subscribers, mainly companies in the high-tech sector. But, in short order, pizza parlours and estate agents are going to put their information on line, insists Martin Tenenbaum, chief executive of Enterprise Integration Technologies, a consulting company managing the project. He suggests that a computer manufacturer could solicit bids on the network for chips, award a contract and purchase those chips on-line, selling the finished products to customers over the network, and claims that business can experience a 10% reduction in product costs and an 80% reduction in the time it takes to order products because of the speed of communications. To enable financial transactions to take place over the network, the service will use Mosaic software that will be encrypted, to protect any sensitive information, such as credit-card numbers.
