E-Business Acceleration Initiative Announced

The E-Business Acceleration Initiative is an attempt to drive .NET Enterprise Server sales by capitalizing on the young but quickly growing business-to-business (B2B) market. It is also an ideal testing ground for Web-based services which, in the .NET vision, are supposed to eventually supplant packaged software to become Microsoft’s primary revenue stream.

The core of the initiative is a group of new software connectors and management consoles called Supplier Accelerator (SA), which will run with Commerce Server, BizTalk Server, and SQL Server. SA, currently being used in several pilot programs,   is designed to solve a critical problem for suppliers who want to post their products on B2B exchanges: transforming their product catalogs into the format used by each exchange. SA will also let these suppliers receive sales information from the exchanges in a useful format and integrate this information into other processes.

Small businesses can gain similar functionality by participating in bCentral’s Commerce Manager, which is essentially a Microsoft-hosted version of SA.