Sun Microsystems Inc and Thomson Multimedia SA will take BroadVision Inc’s Interactive Commerce Management System for their Thomson Sun Interactive end-to-end television framework. BroadVision’s product will manage and process consumer interactions across interactive networks and deliver a range of marketing services. Los Altos, California-based BroadVision’s system is intended to enable the development of a wide variety of transaction-based Open TV interactive services such as near video on demand, interactive advertisments and home shopping. Open TV, introduced in January, is an operating environment for interactive television, and as such is a direct rival to Microware Systems Corp’s David, running on Sun servers at the back end but promised to run on a v ariety of set-top boxes. BroadVision’s Interactive Commerce Management software, will be used to integrate interactivity into network operators’ back end business systems, and can be interfaced with existing billing and ordering systems. The integrated set of software subsystems for commerce management provides customer information and privacy management, usage data collection and reporting, advertising and marketing programmes, as well as on-line pricing, payment and order processing functions.
