B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

Wireless Technologies 363
example, the mundane ability to fill out expense reports in real-time has
cost and efficiency benefits for companies that can make effective use
of centrally administered enterprise resources.
Portals should be able to scale easily to hundreds of thousands of
users and support users on a range of platforms, including PCs, mobile
phones and handheld devices.
Business portal software is rapidly becoming a point of convergence
for the enterprise. Mobile professionals want to take their business
portals with them. Within a few years, untethered points of access to
enterprise portals will make the problems of 'synching' and docking
PIMs and PDAs obsolete.
12.5.3. On-demand trading
A growing cadre of new e-marketplaces is establishing dynamic venues,
such as auctions and exchanges, that allow buyers and sellers to establish
prices in real-time. In these markets, firms won't just participate in
these venues, they will configure online markets for each transaction.
They will do so by trading across multiple product attributes and giving
their favored suppliers special treatment.
To achieve this level of personalization and a dynamic pricing
environment, the e-marketplaces will have to provide real-time
information about market activities to all the users on all types of
devices, including wireless.
With on-demand trading, truckers, for example, will be able to post
capacity or a bid on a load whenever they want. The result will be that
some traveling commodity managers will expect to bid through wireless
devices and respond in the same way.
12.5.4. Business-to-employee (B2E) connections
There are few who now doubt the impact of the Internet revolution. It is
ironic that the need to be wireline connected to an office network or
intranet has ensured that physical location is still necessary for most
knowledge transfer in the workplace. Whether production, sales, or
shipping took place elsewhere, the office's status as the primary location