Business-to-business e-commerce

Cabletron was on the Internet before it was crowded. In the spring of 1995, the networking company put up a corporate Web site-a basic billboard-hosted by BBN Corp. Since then, Cabletron has moved quickly to add new applications and functionality to the site (www.cabletron.com). Now it's one of the most comprehensive, full-featured sites on the Web.

In addition to corporate information, news, products and services, the site is e-commerce enabled. As a business-to-business site, customers can order Cabletron products over the Web, either through a sales representative or through a reseller.

Much of the credit for building the site goes to the partnership Cabletron formed first with BBN, which then extended to GTE Internetworking when it acquired BBN. As a networking company, Cabletron's information services talent is deep and its resources are extensive. The company could have chosen to create and support its Web site in-house, but the time to develop the site would have been much longer and more labor-intensive.

"With e-commerce applications changing so rapidly, we want to partner with companies such as GTE that have extensive expertise," says Shannon Hunter, manager of electronic commerce relations. "Because the time to market continues to shrink, we don't have enough time to develop new applications in-house. We want our development team to concentrate on customizing off-the-shelf products for our customers."

GTE Internetworking has done some of the investigative work that was too time-consuming for Hunter's department. When Hunter decided to add a new product database to the site, GTE interviewed 30 companies she chose and whittled it down to five. "It would have taken us months. Instead, we gave them our criteria, and they cut through the B.S. so we could get to market quickly," she says.

Cabletron's initial investment with GTE is between $2 million and $3 million, but ongoing maintenance costs will be a fraction of these fees for development. GTE provides dedicated hosting services for 12 Cabletron servers located in Chantilly, Va., San Jose, and Leeds, U.K. Cabletron has direct access to GTE's backbone. About 70% of the e-commerce orders are transacted in real time and 30% are done over a nightly batch file.

"GTE could guarantee us network uptime, a distributed architecture and bandwidth to spare. We don't want any of our customers to hit a bottleneck when they try to reach our site," says Kirk Espes, director of electronic commerce at Cabletron.

For Espes, GTE's responsiveness has been the main reason Cabletron continues to partner with the ISP. "GTE has restructured their organization to support us," he says. "When we had problems along the way, GTE dropped what [they were] doing to realign their resources. When we shifted gears midstream on them, they were quick to respond and shift with us. GTE has made it possible for us to continually hit our project's milestones."