Electrifying e-commerce, NCR helps companies bring their business to the Web

NCR will take its experience in data warehousing and transaction processing in a new direction this week, announcing a line of Internet e-commerce products designed to help customers incorporate business transactions into their Web sites.

The e-commerce product line includes an intranet access server, high-availability Web cluster servers for Windows NT, two Web data warehouse software products and a Web transaction product based on NCR's Top End enterprise middleware.

The Web offers a way to expand and enhance telecommunications carriers' traditional lines of business as they start to face competition, said Scott Swain, director of Internet electronic commerce product marketing at NCR.

Using the NCR products, carriers could let customers access their bills or phone records over the Web, or customize their service or billing, Swain said.

AT&T's business markets division is using NCR products to enable its sales staff to analyze and profile customer billing patterns for more efficient marketing efforts, using the NCR 5100M massively parallel processor running NCR's Teradata remote database mining system and two 4300 WorldMark servers as Web servers.

"The NCR system made sense for us cost-wise, and it's a good fit into our existing environment, plus it's scalable should we want to grow or expand our applications," said Barbara Roberts, platform engineer at the business markets division.

The e-commerce product line also provides a way for Internet service providers to track subscribers' use of their networks, said Paul O'Brien, vice president of NCR's communications industry business group.

"This helps ISPs look at transactions and interactions, then use that data in a modeling kind of way to keep their availability up, whether that's through redoing their backbone network or adding modems," he said. The NCR product line is well-suited to the telecom and ISP community because of the company's familiarity with the market, but the offering is viable for anyone interested in moving into Internet commerce, said Steve Josselyn, research director of the commercial systems and servers division of IDC.

"Everyone recognizes that there is a big potential market out there for providing platforms that allow people to do business on the Web," Josselyn said. "NCR has experience with data warehousing and transaction processing, which are key to reliable Internet commerce."