Supply Chain Management Vendor Finds Balance for Service Supply Chains
Michael Bittner - May 8, 2006

Background

The early years for Click Commerce (founded in 1996) centered on extranet enablement, and in particular, on demand chain solutions for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) e-commerce. Click Commerce's early channel management software allowed manual and dynamic creation of relationship hierarchies and online communities within a distribution channel, through the use of membership rules. The intent of this functionality was to help enterprises establish B2B distribution portals and B2B-to-consumer portals. In these portals, the relationships and business process rules between the enterprise and its channel partners are transparent to the consumer. Enterprise channel management strategies gradually gave way to the potentially explosive private trading exchanges (PTXs), leaving Click Commerce and competitor Comergent in a leading position for the sell-side PTX market. This market, however, never materialized...