New Orleans

In front of 1,500 people at his company's user conference here, Commerce One CEO Mark Hoffman said the world is moving toward online trading and vowed that his company will be there when the world arrives.

After the vendor and its business-to-business brethren saw revenues drop in the first quarter, many questioned whether the business community is ready, willing and able to completely re-engineer its supply chain. Hoffman said the change will happen and will be felt on many fronts.

"I see a world that is not consolidated down to a few big marketplaces. I see a world of multiple distributed marketplaces," he said.

From one-to-one trading portals to complex, collaborative exchanges, Hoffman believes, businesses will be active in all sorts of online trading. He said the key for his company is to reduce costs, extend the reach of the marketplaces, improve visibility and increase speed.

Last week, Commerce One announced separate deals with SAP AG and Microsoft Corp. designed to improve the flow of internal and external business data and to broaden the pool of companies that can link to online exchanges.

Yet in a smaller session at the conference, Keith Colonna, Commerce One's vice president of e-revolution, acknowledged that marketplaces have yet to deliver the key functionality many users wanted when they entered those arenas.

Colonna said collaborative supply chains are still an unrealized dream. In fact, he noted, many companies still need to improve internal collaboration and flow of data before they can integrate successfully with an external trading partner.

"Everybody's asking for the supply chain in a box, which really doesn't exist," he said.

Colonna also said marketplaces have been "a win-lose proposition," good for buyers but bad for suppliers. "We have to find a better balance," he said.