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We know there is a lot to do to enable easier ecommerce.

There has been a lot of blog comments about the current US SunStore. This storefront was designed years ago and we know the world has come a long way. We believe that ecommerce is made up of at least three connections.

First, the traditional Business-to-Consumer. This is typical of the consumer stores you might experience going to sony.com, or Amazon. For an enterprise company, having an easy to use storefront allows customers to easily generate quotes, do comparison shopping, and allows easy transactions to occur. Along with a storefront comes business processes. This is usually where the hard work is as it must be coordinated with many groups within a company- from sales, to order processing, finance, and operations.

The second area is direct Business-to-Business (other wise known as EDI. When companies buy direct, they want to have custom catalogs with pre-approved configurations, pre-negotiated pricing all show up, then link to their existing purchasing systems to automate the approval process. Once an order is placed, gooing directly into the vendors systems as booked simplifies the ordering and delivery cycle, cuts down on transactions costs, and improves the complete end-to-end experience. Many companies will not do business with you unless you can deliver the integration.

The third area is what we call Busines-through-Partner (B2P). Many companies work with reseller partners who add value or specialize in certain segments. Unfortunately, many of the resellers have to replicate the product catalog, create custom price lists, and manually have to feed back the actual orders. Many modern systems can also directly automate how partners can utilize the vendors "storefront" with full brand customization. The beauty with this model is it saves the reseller from having to recreate the supply chain all over again, improves the quality of the order, and of course, with the ease of use, should also grow overall revenue.

We are actively developing these new capabilities to really bring Sun's ecommerce capabilities to the cutting edge (finally). We read pretty much all the comments out there on the current experience or in some cases, lack of. It'll be really wonderful to finally put in place a modern, web services based ecommerce platform that really can help drive simplicity and more on-line revenue. Exciting times ahead.