Joe Neuhaus sometimes felt as if he were riding a whirlwind as the CTO of Prime Advantage, a business-to-business e-commerce marketplace provider in a sector experiencing one of the more spectacular flameouts of the tech downturn.
E-marketplaces, those online business-to-business exchanges that were supposed nto revolutionize the way companies sell and procure goods and manage their supply chains, took some tough hits after the Internet bubble burst last year.
Ariba and Commerce One are finally rolling out fixes to satisfy suppliers that use on-line B2B marketplaces, but the question is whether the efforts are too little, too late.
The balance has clearly swung to the sell-side of the business-to-business arena as vendors target once-ignored suppliers with solutions designed to ease their entry and performance in on-line marketplaces. Industry heavyweights are readying products and services that will help suppliers who have so far been slighted in the business-to-business (B2B) game. These solutions are designed to foster long-term relationships between buyers and sellers, rather than supporting e-marketplaces where sellers' profit margins are squeezed.