- 2 - The New, New B2B Hub Sandy McGuffog, Jun 2000 © 2001 Sixhills Consulting Ltd & Author While it’s always dangerous to draw conclusions from the performance of individual stocks – for example, both Commerce One and Ariba have concluded significant alliances (with SAP and i2/IBM respectively) in the period under consideration, a powerful argument can be made what is happing here is a fundamental move in market sentiment away from centralized “single hub fits all” structures where any given customer was expected to transact exclusively on one hub to “many-to-many” structures where any given customer will connect to many hubs. Firstly, customers perceptions of their real needs have changed, with customers shying away from single hubs on the basis of “not wanting to be tied to anyone”, as well as a powerful move across the industry to form hubs based on business alliances rather than use neutral third party hubs. Secondly, technology issues are driving a more distributed structure – central catalogue maintenance has turned into a nightmare for players with “single hub” models, and linking hubs together effectively, a requirement for single hub systems to offer a broad array of goods, has become a non-starter. Finally, B2B solution providers themselves have started to move away from single hub models. Not only do they have an incentive to sell as many proprietary solutions as they can, rather than the standards based solutions that single hub models require, but they also need alliances with other players, alliances that are more easily made if it doesn’t look as if they are trying to take over their alliance players’ core business. A good example of this is the SAP and Commerce One alliance, where Commerce One building hubs with powerful transactional capabilities could easily threaten SAP’s ERP system franchise. Sandy McGuffog, Jun 2000
< Page 1 | Page 3 >