Open Text Corporation announced b2bScene.com, a cross-industry, collaborative commerce marketplace. b2bScene.com will operate as an independent division of Open Text, leveraging Livelink’s collaborative capabilities and its new personalized interface, myLivelink. This new Division will provide marketplace services to small, medium and large organizations. In addition to buying and selling goods and services online, successful e-business interaction relies on collaboration between buyers and sellers, facilitating dialogue between parties, automating business processes (e.g., product sourcing, design and production) and managing the wealth of information around each transaction. b2bScene.com will leverage Open Text’s collaborative business applications to achieve dynamic collaboration among an organization’s employees, business partners and customers in both public and private trading communities. b2bScene.com will host and support a public and a member-driven Internet marketplace, offering access to services through a personalized interface. Kirk Roberts, formerly Senior Vice President, Customer Services and Information Technology, Open Text Corporation, have been appointed President of the new Division.www.b2bscene.com, www.opentext.com
Day: February 23, 2000
Through the ACORD standards-setting process, both Property/Casualty and Life subcommittees have voted to adopt the first insurance industry standard XML transactions. Called ACORD XML for P&C Insurance and ACORD XML for Life Insurance, the transaction standards adopted have been developed through a cooperative process involving hundreds of organizations from the insurance and related financial services industries. ACORD XML is based on existing ACORD standards, thereby easing migration to XML, a cross-industry e-commerce standard for business-to-business and business-to-consumer transactions. The ACORD XML initiatives focus on defining a set of standards detailing interfaces, data, and error processing relevant to insurance business functions. These standards enable real-time exchange of information and integration of systems used in day-to-day operations for processing insurance. They enable insurance carriers to face the challenge of providing a single set of views or interfaces into their supporting back-end systems. The P&C adoption includes several XML business messages that enable the real-time exchange of quote and application transactions for personal and commercial lines of insurance over the Internet. Included in the adoption is the Interactive Financial Exchange (IFX) specification, which provides a standard framework architecture to ensure interoperability among multiple trading partners using IFX. The ACORD P&C Transaction Review Board has provided business and technical expertise from organizations such as PMSC, The Hartford, AMS, Travelers, Microsoft, SAFECO, IVANS, National Grange Mutual, Applied Systems, Ontos, and Symmetry Technology Labs. Currently several other working groups are developing additional transactions for use in the insurance industry and in dealing with trading partners. www.acord.org
