Internet commerce transaction and storefront software company Mercantec Inc will today announce a strategic relationship with Science Applications International Corp, the large privately-held Washington DC-based, engineering, research and systems integration firm. SAIC, which is the parent company of Bellcore and Network Solutions Inc, will market the Mercantec SoftCart software if SAIC customers want a web transaction engine or storefront tool. Mercantec’s dominant channel is through ISPs. About 85 ISPs and web hosters in 11 countries offer Mercantec’s software, including PSINet Inc, GTE Internetworking, Mindspring Inc and Hiway Technologies. It also has a systems integration deal with Lockheed Martin. The privately-held Naperville, Illinois-based company launched version 4.0 of SoftCart in September, the first version to introduce tiered products. There’s a basic version, called Startup, a middle version called Lite, which supports up to 100 products and the full version which supports unlimited products and costs $100 per month. Mercantec founder and chief executive Andy Parker says the company changed to monthly subscription- based model to better suit ISPs, as new hosting customers did not want to fork out a large lump sum for web commerce software as well as their monthly ISP fee. Late last month the company got approval from the US department of Commerce to export SoftCart using a public key size of up to 4,096 bits in length. Parker reckons it is the only pure e-commerce company to be granted such a license and admits that the company was expecting to be knocked back to 1,024 bits by the National Security Agency. But timing was everything as Mercantec was negotiating just as the laws were relaxed. The technology was licensed from Network Associates Inc’s Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) unit. Mercantec sees itself as a supplier of transaction processing for web sites, rather than a mere supplier of storefront building software. It can provide the links between order fulfillment and catalogs and other elements of web commerce. However, it is not in the business of transaction management – most ISPs don’t use CICS says Parker – because with the web the user works as the transaction manager, says Parker. If a transaction doesn’t go through and the user refreshes a page to do it again, s/he should be presented with the data still intact. Parker knows about transaction processing, having spent ten years at Tandem Computers Inc, now part of Compaq Computer Corp. As for the next cut of SoftCart, version 4.5 will be effectively a maintenance release, arriving in the second quarter. Version 5.0 will be the next major release, and is currently slated for around August next year. It will add the ability to use generic business rules for merchandising purposes, such as reduced by 15% this week, and so on. Parker says the company doesn’t come against Open Market Inc that often when trying to win customers but says it does see Intershop fairly regularly, but says that software is more suited to co-location work where the physical server is located at the ISP. It believes IBM Net.Commerce is too expensive for many ISPs.
