Web-Based Solutions

Leading e-Procurement vendors are now focused on delivering Web-based applications that utilize the Web as part of their platforms. With these solutions, you don’t need to distribute software to all of your employees because the application runs over the Internet. Generally, Web-based applications are cheaper and easier to manage than their client-server based counterparts.

It is ironic that the idea of an Internet-based system creates fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the minds of many clients looking to purchase new systems such as e-Procurement. With the increasing need to distribute information to the branches and front lines, the most cost-effective and easy-to-use approach would naturally be to use the Internet as the backbone architecture.

Many people do not realize that the Internet can be run inside firewalls as an Intranet or local area network. In this way, organizations can closely guard their networks and completely prevent outside penetration. Still the term “Internet” does bring with it questions of security, performance, and overall business success. While these issues can be countered with sound technical explanations as well as the testimony of other financial institutions and credit unions that are using the Internet without a hitch!

What the “I” word should really stand for is its ability to enable virtually unlimited scalability, the use of state-of-the-art technology where most new development is being focused worldwide, the ability to integrate with disparate data and systems, and the ease-of-use due to a ubiquitous interface that virtually anyone with a computer can exploit. Realizing these benefits, most technology vendors rushed to bring their products to the Internet. This came in two forms: Web-based and Web-enabled.

There are significant technical differences in these approaches. Web-based is a ground-up approach that assumes the Internet is the only network paradigm in use for the system. Web-enabled usually refers to older, non-Internet systems that now include an Internet component or interface. From a vendor perspective, the decision whether to use Web-based versus Web-enabled depends on both the history and the future direction of the technology since Web-based design does require an entire re-write of software and a total commitment to using technologies such as Java, HTML, XML, and browsers.

Like any technology, there are benefits and limitations to each architecturalapproach. So vendors are usually careful to make these decisionsin the initial implementation, hoping that the benefits outweigh thelimitations and that new technology is not going to be pervasive in thenear term. It is not unusual that vendors do rewrite entire products tolater change their architecture completely.

Vendors that have a heavy investment in an older technology may be unwilling or simply unable to completely move the systems to the Internet. Instead, they opt to add a new Web dress - one that makes it look like it runs on the Internet but as a façade; it most likely looks better than it performs.

See an accompanying article that shows how Bellwether Software, plans to be the leading player in the small and mid tier marketplace with its announcement of the planned 2007 release of an 100% web-based offering of its existing purchasing and material management solution PMX on its new platform and called e-PMX!