A Common E-Commerce Platform

by Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO —

When I was thinking of starting Tealeaf, the VCs had me play me a game called "The Rock."

I had to demonstrate that there was a vast, untapped market for what Tealeaf would do — and also convince the folks with money that my approach was relevant and defensible… as in "Bring me back a red rock showing a multi-billion market potential for your technology along with a business plan for how we would address it."

So, back in 1999 our dream was to attach Tealeaf to the standard e-commerce platforms and ride the coattails of their success.

BroadVision, Intershop, Blue Martini, OpenMarket, Commerce One, Vignette, ATG were my red rocks.

Yesterday, ATG announced that they are being acquired by Oracle for 1 billion dollars. At least they had a happy ending.

The others had meteoric rises into the stratosphere. However, they all came crashing down like Spacelab.

From what I can tell, the most common e-commerce platform is "Other" — custom solutions built on top of IBM WebSphere, Microsoft Commerce Server or just plain old code. Given the rise of SOA and Web Services, certain components of the stack may be third-party services, but most sites are largely built from the ground up.

Remember, in the childhood fable of the tortoise and the hare, it was the tortoise who won. So too shall Tealeaf as Customer Experience Management goes mainstream.