MessageQuest Inc, the five-year-old MQSeries consultancy, products and services firm, has changed its name to CommerceQuest and launched itself into what it claims is a new business sector – electronic commerce managed network services. Last week, at the e-Business conference in San Jose, the company launched e-Net, which it says provides reliable and secure business-to-business information integration and e-commerce managed network services over any type of network – including the internet.
According to Colin Osborne, CEO of CommerceQuest, business-to- business e-commerce, especially when conducted over the internet is unreliable, unsecured, and not managed by anyone. He positions the e-Net service as an alternative to traditional value added networks or electronic data interchange services. The service is aimed at users who want to exchange large volumes of mission critical information over the internet, or an extranet, VAN, WAN, or virtual private network. It can be bridged with legacy EDI systems from the likes of AT&T, IBM, GE Information Services, Sterling Commerce and Harbinger.
CommerceQuest handles the development deployment and management, transactional integrity and security, and quality of service. It hosts the service on its own twin mainframes, situated in different geographic cities, and uses MQSeries, CICs and DB2 as its underlying technology. It also has tools for integrating its services in with database records and point-of-sales systems at both customer and supplier sites, although it plans to work with partners, such as Exodus Communications Inc, when applications hosting services are required.
Osborne, who was IBM’s business manager for MQSeries at the UK’s Hursley Labs before joining Tampa, Florida-based MessageQuest, says he argued for years that such a service was necessary, but there are still no other companies doing it. Other services are either vulnerable to internet failures or restricted to a single VAN he says. e-Net provides authentication, authorization, and non-repudiation support using technologies such as RSA encryption and X.509 certificate authentication.
Customers pay for the service as the use it, so don9t face capital expenditure and skills availability issues. It9s not a cost issue, but a speed of business and speed of change issue says Osborne. Changing trading suppliers or customers is now easier, as all already have an internet connection installed. CommerceQuest has 250 staff.
