Confused? You're Not Alone – Channel Futures

Confused? You’re Not Alone

Written by Channel
June 30, 2000

Posted: 07/2000

Confused? You’re Not Alone

Savvy marketers long ago learned to take advantage of marketplace confusion. And, boy, are they having a heyday now. Everybody and his brother are calling themselves an ASP–even under the very loosest of definitions–presumably to capture the mind share and wallets of consumers and Wall Street.

In researching this month’s cover story on telecom vortals–vertical e-marketplaces–a similar deluge occurred. Many companies came under radar, calling themselves telecom e-

marketplaces. In fact, some were aggregators.

What’s the difference?

An e-marketplace is a neutral forum for commerce, content and community. That means professionals can enter the marketplace to obtain information, talk with peers or buy and sell equipment/services. These are the basic functions of an e-marketplace although at present some e-marketplaces do not contain all three.

An aggregator, on the other hand, sources many competing or synergistic products and makes them available for sale often along with additional support services. The aggregator is an agent or reseller, earning a commission or markup. The value-add may be comparison shopping, one-stop shopping or product integration. Certainly, there is value in this model both on the retail and wholesale sides, but it is not an e-marketplace in its currently defined form.

Where the confusion may originate is with this term “B2B exchange.” It is being tossed about like rice at a wedding. To my knowledge there exist no hard and fast rules about what constitutes a B2B exchange. What’s B2B? Wholesale? Retail? What’s an exchange? True trading where buyers are sellers and vise versa? Or, is it simply any transaction?

To be completely noncommittal, it’s

probably all of those things … at least for now.

My point (yes, I have one) is that a company may not be what it says or, more importantly, what you think it says. It’s important to look beyond the home page to see what it’s really doing.

PHONE+ plans to help in this regard. This month, read our cover story on telecom vortals. It contains the only publicly available list of telecom e-marketplaces. Next month, we will look at CASPs–that’s communications application services providers. (Yet another new term to confuse.)

In addition, PHONE+ has instituted a new department called “Trading Post.” In it we will address questions from readers about telecommunications capacity trading issues. Our first installment on page 24 answers the question: “What is the role of an OTC broker?” Next month, we will answer the question: “What is an index?”

Got a question? Send it to phonplus@vpico.com with TRADING POST in the subject line. Answers will be posted on our website (www.phoneplusmag.com) and considered for publication in a future issue of PHONE+.

Khali Henderson