E-Business: The First Wave of Electronic Commerce

E-Business: The First Wave of Electronic Commerce

Electronic commerce has revolutionized the value chains of nearly every industry, regardless if their focus is on business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) markets and the extent of their distribution networks prior to the pervasive adoption of the Web. Many of the initial studies of e-commerce credited the Internet and the invention of the Hypertext Transfer Protocols with the flexibility of creating web pages that could easily be used for e-marketing and promotion (Rose, Hair, Clark, 2011). Only after the initial generation of e-commerce businesses had experienced the challenges of synchronizing their entire value chains to the new, demanding and time-critical needs of consumers online in the case of B2C and the speed of transactions and scalability challenges in B2B e-business make system and process integration a priority.

e-Business drove the need for much greater levels of integration standards and clarity of communication across the many different legacy, third-party enterprise systems that had to be integrated into the websites and selling systems for e-commerce to be successful. The need for integration standards was particularly important in the high tech components and hardware markets, where wide variations existed in how transitions were managed. The creation of the RosettaNet standard was instrumental in creating a unified, industry-wide approach to managing transactions across the complex supply chains of high tech manufacturers, their suppliers, and their channel partners (Kauremaa, Nurmilaakso, Tanskanen, 2010). RosettaNet was created by Ingram Micro, the world's leading distributor of computer hardware, software and services, and sold through over 4,500 resellers in the U.S. alone (Kauremaa, Nurmilaakso, Tanskanen, 2010). RosettaNet was developed to create a common language for enabling transactions in real-time throughout the high tech industry's supply chains while also providing real-time visibility into the distribution channels, demand chains and the Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) processes across the industry (Kauremaa, Nurmilaakso, Tanskanen, 2010). By focusing on this level of integration across the entire industry, there was greater level of order accuracy and efficiency for the resellers who relied on the Ingram Micro system to serve their customers, while RosettaNet also made it possible for largest suppliers in the market to be more efficient. Intel was the first to standardize on RosettaNet and streamline their transactions using the processes included in the standard (Kauremaa, Nurmilaakso, Tanskanen, 2010). This in turn led to all of Intel's competitors also supporting transactions and soon the standard was accepted.

The example of RosettaNet is illustrative of how e-commerce maturing beyond just the front page of a website set up in the HTTP protocol to embrace the full enterprise-wide integration necessary for the utmost value of e-business strategies and business models to be achieved. During this phase of the e-business maturity process, companies creating e-business strategies and platforms began using more efficient coding platforms as well, with Java (J2EE) being prevalent (Chun-yan, Kong-lai, Zong-guo, 2010). J2EE, and later AJAX would give developers much greater flexibility in meeting the needs of e-business application users and in creating entirely new approaches to creating unique user experiences (Udo, Bagchi, Kirs, 2010).