Commercial e-commerce servers and enterprise application integration: a case-based comparison of Net.Commerce and Site Server Commerce

With the growing importance of e-commerce, commercially available e-commerce servers are increasingly gaining ground. We have tested some of these products, and report our experience with two of the most commonly implemented products, IBM´s Net.Commerce (NC) and Microsoft´s Site Server Commerce (SSC) Edition. After a short description of the two systems, we introduce the case of the shoe wholesaler Rohde, for which prototypes of both systems have been implemented and investigated. The case is a business-to-business study; but the findings are also applicable to the business-to-consumer segment. The Rohde specific comparison investigates the implementation appropriateness and feasibility of both systems in the light of Rohde´s business requirements. It focuses on the integration of the servers with the installed back-end system (ERP). We have found that this integration was way more complicated than the commercials lead us to believe at first. In general building enterprise applications by customization of packaged software systems reemphasizes the trade-off between ease of customization versus ability to express the actual business model in terms of these software systems. Our findings are summarized and directions for further research are given in the concluding section.