First mooted by AmEx and the Internet Purchasing round table in 1996, the Open Buying on the Internet (OBI) Consortium gets its first public demonstration at the Internet Commerce Expo (ICE) in Los Angeles this week. AmEx will be there, of course, with BOC Gases, IBM, Microsoft, Netscape and Office Depot among the other member-participants. KPMG Consulting is coordinating the event. OBI was built to make internet shopping easy and open standards- based, particularly for high volume, low cost goods and services. The OBI Showcase has been designed to display the standard in business-to-business applications at its interoperable, vendor- neutral best. The carrot for potential attendees is the prospect of reducing purchasing costs by eliminating multiple proprietary systems. They’ll be beating them off with a stick. á