Intershop Teams with French Firm to Push E-Commerce Solutions

Intershop Communications, Inc. and Cap Gemini — a French management consulting and systems integration company — have joined forces to push e-commerce solutions.

According to a joint statement, the two companies will share international sales opportunities, collaborating to assist telecom operators and service providers to “define their e-commerce strategies.”

Delivering E-Expertise

Alexandre Haeffner, group vice president of Cap Gemini Telecom & Media commented that his company has “found that telecom operators must provide more than communications bandwidth to electronic commerce players.”

“They need to provide value-added services, such as e-commerce site hosting and content aggregation,” added Haeffner, “either by building infrastructure themselves, or by partnering with service providers. By collaborating with Intershop, we will deliver the expertise to allow our operators/clients and their own clienteles to seamlessly integrate Intershop’s technology into their information systems.”

More Than Enabling Simple Business-to-Consumer Storefronts

San Francisco-based Intershop — a provider of business-to-business and business-to-consumer e-commerce solutions — announced this week the availability of Intershop 4, the latest version of its e-commerce software for commerce service providers (CSPs).

Designed for ISPs, portals, telcos and Web communities, Intershop 4 assists them to deliver e-commerce hosting services to small and medium-sized businesses. The product enables sellers to design and build e-commerce environments with merchandising features and browser-based business administration.

“Sell-side e-commerce is more than enabling simple business-to-consumer storefronts,” stated Sam Boonin, director of product marketing for Intershop. “Intershop 4 also supports diverse CSP business models such as commerce communities and business-to-business marketplaces.”

E-Commerce By The Numbers

Intershop recently disclosed that to date there are 20,000 companies internationally who have utilized their solutions to gain an online commerce presence.

According to a May, 1999 Dataquest Market Share report, Intershop led in sales of sell-side, e-commerce software revenue in 1998, edging out InterWorld, Microsoft, AOL/Netscape, IBM, Mercantec and Oracle.

E-Biz & E-B.S.

Known for more than e-commerce solutions, Intershop recently launched a much-discussed series of print advertisements intended to lampoon IBM’s massive e-business campaign. The ads, created in collaboration with Winkler Advertising, feature terms that it hopes will make their way into the lexicon, such as “e-b.s.,” “e-consultant hell” and “e-terminated.”

Company spokesperson Stephan Schambach, in a Wired report, stated that the company’s intention is “to poke fun at the whole industry. We were trying to leverage the whole e-hype and show that Intershop is a leader in electronic commerce,” Schambach added.