Taking the lead with e-commerce

A survey recently conducted by Frost & Sullivan predicted massive growth within the European e-commerce market by the year 2004. Several vendors have already recognised the potential in this area, however, and what can only be described as a siege on the market is now in full flow.

Starting with an initiative to provide ISPs with a complete off-the-shelf e-commerce solution, Horizon has launched Secur-E-Com, while both Segue and Rational have released toolkits designed to test e-commerce applications.

Horizon's Secur-E-Com product provides 10 fully integrated merchant shopfronts, enabling ISPs to get their customers' businesses online quickly and efficiently.

With Secur-E-Com, Horizon has bundled JCP's web transaction security software, Netscape's serving software and Intershop's shopping mall software onto a high-performance Sun Enterprise 250 platform.

Secur-E-Com also features 128-bit encryption with fast performance. Horizon offers store design and setup, online payment services, integration to back-end systems, support and maintenance, and training.

LiveQuality, the first of our e-commerce testing solutions, from Segue Software, comprises three main components: LiveQuality Realizer, LiveQuality Producer and LiveQuality Delivery. The first is used to schedule, execute and monitor scenarios across the e-business system, and includes a 25-user licence for the Realizer interface, and a Java-based application for the creation and execution of scenarios.

"The world of e-business has created corporate software systems that are markedly different from their predecessors," commented Steve Butler, president and CEO of Segue. "LiveQuality is our response to the industry's evolving testing requirements and provides an immediate solution for an organisation's complex e-business challenges."

Rational's e-commerce testing package, Rational TeamTest 7, has a range of new features - including support for dynamic HTML, defect tracking, load testing and reliability testing, along with a five-user licence of Silk Suite to create component-based tests for use in scenarios. The Performer Prototyper will also verify communication and network traffic across tiers of the e-business system.

TeamTest's Object-Orientated Recording technology has been extended to include e-commerce applications, and as a result, it can recognise the Java structure of the application tested and be played back in any web-based environment.

"The goal of Rational TeamTest 7 is to help organisations share and leverage common test assets," commented Tom Bogan, vice-president of Rational.

"It also has the ability to test every dimension of an application's quality and provide support for heterogeneous e-commerce environments."

All three products are available immediately, with pricing on all three products dependent on the implementation.

Horizon: (0181) 570 6006

Rational: (01344) 462 500

Segue: (001) 781 402 1000

FUTURE FANTASTIC: BOOMING E-COMMERCE

A survey compiled by Frost & Sullivan predicted that while e-commerce revenue will hit $8.07bn by 2004, the consumer internet subscriber rate is set to grow from 9.9 million to 44.9 million.

This has huge implications for e-business, and security and testing will play a huge role. The survey outlines that for those who overcome the objections of cost, difficulty and security, the rewards will be entry into the fastest-growing market in history.

All three of the above products will ease that path in their own way, and let's face it - who wouldn't want to be a part of the fastest-growing market in history?