Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition--eOneGroup Readies Express Version of E-Commerce App

eOneGroup is putting the finishing touches on eOneCommerce XI, a scaled-down "express" version of its flagship application for creating B2B and B2C Web sites that connect to back-end data stores, usually an OS/400 server. As with many express products, the goal with eOneCommerce XI is to simplify preconfiguring applications with the most commonly used settings. In exchange for reduced customization options, the software installs more quickly and is 50 percent cheaper than the unrestricted version.

If you haven't heard of eOneGroup yet, you haven't been paying attention to IBM's iSeries marketing efforts. The company has worked with Big Blue several times in the last couple of years to develop advertisements, case studies, and other marketing tools that showcase the success that the Omaha, Nebraska, company has had with eOneCommerce--its Java-and-XML-based e-commerce application--at OS/400 shops, including Omaha Steaks, Tommy Hilfiger, Wolferman's, and YKK USA.

But, like many software vendors these days, eOneGroup is feeling the pressure to simplify its product set. With eOneCommerce XI expected to become generally available in the next week or so, customers are being given the prospect of capitalizing on the experience that eOneGroup has gained with its eOneCommerce installations.

Since the company started selling eOneCommerce five years ago, certain patterns have emerged in user behavior, says Dan Watson, an eOneGroup cofounder. Watson estimates that, on typical installations, customers spend 30 percent of the implementation time figuring out how they want their site to look and feel, including deciding which buttons, graphics, and navigation elements to use.

With eOneCommerce XI, the company has included several prepackaged styles that customers can choose from, to hasten the implementation. "We pulled out the APIs [from eOneCommerce] and prepackaged them into XI styles," Watson says. "Customer picks the style they want, from a navigation perspective, and then pop in their own graphics and their own colors."

Each of the four styles the company will be offering will include its own specialized functionality. The styles include manufacturing and customer service, which provides order-entry- and order-status-type functionality; a catalog style, for online ordering; a retail style, for B2C and gift-giving; and a distribution style, which features more complex ordering and configuration functionality.

In exchange for the ease of implementation, customers will sacrifice some flexibility with the eOneCommerce XI product compared with the complete version, Watson says. The company has removed APIs from the full version in order to make eOneCommerce XI provide real-time access to the back-end application (an OS/400 server in 80 percent of eOneGroup installs), to retrieve things like order history, order status, inventory, and pricing, Watson says. However, customers can buy these APIs separately with the XI product.

Like its bigger brother, eOneCommerce XI was written in Java and will run on any Java platform. Some OS/400 shops (YKK USA, for example) are running the software in iSeries Linux partitions. The only prerequisites for the software are a Java application server and a relational database; the company says it supports all of them.

However, Watson says the company has found its coziest home running on IBM's "Blue Ice" package, which combines an IBM's xSeries Intel server, SuSE's Linux distribution, DB2, and WebSphere Application Server. "It's supported by one vendor, so you don't have to call three different vendors for support."

From a technical point of view, the eOneCommerce product family consists of database-driven e-commerce applications that simplify designing, hosting, and maintaining B2B and B2C Web sites. The company says the applications' Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture eliminates many of the contentious technical issues that companies face with large and complicated e-commerce sites when they tie together their user interface, database, and application logic. Users interact with the software through a number of prebuilt interface points, including validators (credit card authorization), functions (price calculator), actions (member login) and exits (empty cart). The result of all this integration, the company says, is that you don't need a team of specialists to implement the software, just somebody who knows HTML and who is capable of inserting eOneCommerce's XML tags into them.

Pricing for eOneCommerce XI is based on the number of processors it runs on and on the number of Web sites it runs on. Pricing will start at around $20,000 and range up to $40,000 or $50,000--about half the price of the full eOneCommerce product. "In the SMB [small and midsized business] market, to get a solution like ours costs a million bucks," he says. "We can really bring the price down, because it's pre-architected."

The eOneCommerce XI is nearing the end of beta tests at a chocolate gift-giving Web site; general availability will happen soon thereafter. For more information, go to www.eonegroup.com.