Acta, Forrester and Ernst & Young Launch National Tour
Acta Technology, Inc. announced that it has teamed up with Forrester Research and Ernst & Young for a national seminar tour on "Closing the e-Commerce Gap." The four-city tour will call attention to the data integration gap that has hampered the development of business-to-business e-Commerce.
Acta also announced that it has hired Phil Brotherton, a former marketing executive at Hewlett-Packard, as vice president of e-Commerce. Brotherton, one of the tour's featured speakers, will discuss Acta's e2e (enterprise to e-Commerce), a data infrastructure for integrating back-end systems with front-end Web applications.
Also on the tour will be Laurie Orlov, a senior analyst for e-Commerce at Forrester Research. Orlov will discuss "ERP e-Commerce Realities." Gregg Clark, a partner at Ernst & Young (a leading systems integrator) will advise attendees on how they can strategically migrate their businesses to the Web. Dates for "Closing the e-Commerce Gap" include: -0- *T February 15 - San Francisco, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel March 2 - Chicago, at the Westin Michigan Avenue Hotel March 3 - Boston, at the Marriot Cambridge Hotel March 22 - Houston, at the Doubletree Hotel/Allen Center *T Tour Goals: Raise Awareness & Present Solutions
"Closing the e-Commerce Gap" is designed for a broad audience, including executives responsible for driving e-Commerce strategy and IT managers in charge of data warehousing or SAP.
The tour, said Brotherton, will help companies "make e-Commerce real" by demonstrating how they can connect their back and front-end systems.
"The top item on our agenda is to raise awareness," said Brotherton. "Everyone knows that business-to-consumer (b2c) sites are suffering- witness all the Christmas failures in the news over the past month. But scant attention has been paid to the fact that b2b e-Commerce is facing the same problem. Most commercial Web sites, whether they are b2c or b2b, simply are not ready for prime time. The back-end systems and the front-end e-Commerce sites are disconnected."
According to AMR Research, in a survey of 800 US companies between $30 million and $80 billion in size, 88 percent have a corporate Web site but only 18 percent of those sites provide simple features such as the ability to grant customers and vendors access to billing and order status.
"These are essential features for b2b e-Commerce- they form the basis of customer and vendor relations- yet the vast majority of b2b sites don't have them," said Brotherton.
Brotherton will also discuss how Dell Corporation and Maxtor (an Acta customer) are benefiting from Acta's e2e architecture.
"If your business is like Dell's, you need to be joined at the hip with your customers and suppliers- online, in real-time. Your customers want online access to product availability, configuration, and pricing information. e2e is helping deliver this kind of information, by intelligently combining Acta's ERP data extraction technologies with features essential for e-Commercescalability, 24x7 access, and minimal impact of ERP systems."
Acta recently announced the general availability of Acta Customer Billing e-Cache for SAP R/3. The product- the first in Acta's e2e product suite- will enable companies to strengthen their customer relationships by securely providing online access to billing data.