SCIQUEST.COM's B2B E-MARKETPLACE
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THE BACKGROUND
SciQuest was founded by Peyton Anderson (Anderson), Scott Andrews and Keith
Gunter in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina in 1995. Before opening its
online store, SciQuest conducted a survey of the audience its web site planned
to target. The company first launched an informational web site and
product-sourcing service in 1995. The web site allowed users to access a
comprehensive online database of scientific products and suppliers with a
powerful search engine. SciQuest generated its revenues from scientific vendors
who paid an annual subscription fee for inclusion in the database. By 1999,
about 25,000 of the 150,000 research laboratories in the US used SciQuest for
research and browsing and 50,000 unique visitors[1] logged on to the site every
month.
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Although the web site was becoming increasingly
popular, the founders had much bigger plans for it. All of them were
former sales professionals for Baxter Scientific Products, which sold
beakers, test tubes and chemicals to scientist, and they were well aware
that many companies encouraged their scientists to procure specialized
equipment, products and high precision tools, on their own. Commenting on
the 4-6 hours spent by scientists for procuring supplies, Anderson said,
"If you multiply that across 100,000 scientists, and we save them five
percent of their time, it's equivalent to having 5,000 more researchers
looking for new drugs and new cures.Our role is to be the facilitator of that
information-gathering and communications, an honest broker in the middle - we
are simply the medium that allows scientists and suppliers to communicate
efficiently with one another." |
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SciQuest wanted to develop an e-commerce web site to make it easy for
researchers to find and purchase the equipment they needed. They also wanted to
transform the site from being just an information provider to an e-commerce B2B
marketplace. Work on this project started in 1997-98. SciQuest entered into
technological partnerships with leading software solution providers such as
IBM, Oracle, Ariba and Commerce One.
SciQuest decided to begin transforming its website by implementing a robust
e-commerce solution that could integrate powerful search capabilities with
easy-to-use online shopping functions. The company needed to build the
e-marketplace from scratch, including back-end transaction processes such as
fulfillment and accounting. The company evaluated many major e-commerce
products in the market, finally settling for IBM's offerings in 1998. David
Skowron, vice president of technology at SciQuest said, "Our final decision was
based on an evaluation of product scalability, flexibility and price. This
decision was reconfirmed when we recently re-evaluated our burgeoning business
needs and opted to migrate to Web Sphere Commerce Suite[2], which we believe is
the most comprehensive, robust e-marketplace solution today."
[1] While tracking the volume of traffic on a website, it refers to a person who visits a website more than once within a specified period of time. Unique visitors are measured according to their unique IP addresses and are counted only once no matter how many times they visit the site.
[2] It provided a B2C and B2B commerce server environment on which SciQuest could maintain its enterprise data and business critical systems. By using the WebSphere Commerce suite environment, SciQuest could develop and deploy commerce applications to the Unix S/390 Enterprise Server environment. The S/390 enterprise servers provided high availability and the performance needed to handle peak Internet driven workloads as well as being scalable according to the growing needs of customers e-business applications.
THE TECHNOLOGY
THE FUTURE
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