AS THE CTO of Haht Commerce, Rowland Archer is trying to establish Haht as a leading provider of b-to-b e-commerce software that is easy to install and integrate. To make that happen, Haht leverages cutting-edge RAD (rapid application development) techniques such as extreme programming. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Archer, a co-founder and former CEO of the company, explains why he thinks that sell-side e-commerce is the next great frontier for e-business.

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InfoWorld: How do you describe the market space Haht Commerce is in?

Archer: The space that we're in is business-to-business, sell-side e-commerce ; that is probably the most common phrase. We're going into manufacturers, primarily chemical consumer-products manufacturers and companies involved in discrete manufacturing and putting in systems that typically start around order management that in real time are integrated with their enterprise systems, particularly ERP systems.

InfoWorld: What impact has the changing economic landscape had on the enthusiasm for these kinds of projects among your potential customers?

Archer: We never really tapped into the sort of super-hype adrenaline stuff that was in the market. And we didn't make a ton of money selling to b-to-b marketplaces that suddenly disappeared. But the pressure is still there for customers to do something about e-business. It's not as incredibly intense, but in my way of thinking, these guys have to now focus on how to do a better job integrating with their customers and their channels. It feels to me like a relentless, continuous trend that's going to go on for at least the next five years, if not longer. And the companies that don't do it are going to be left disconnected.

InfoWorld: For a while, disintermediation was a buzzword related to the Internet. Now the focus seems to be more on integrating the channel and re-intermediation. What's driving that change in attitude?

Archer: It's the old story: If you don't add value, get out of the way. Manufacturers don't want to do that business directly, and resellers, in turn, are not going to want to stock a lot of inventory. It's all about how you keep mind share all the way down through the resellers and the ultimate customer. And it's about how you leverage the distributor, who's doing a lot of the very unsexy, low-margin, heavy lifting of stocking inventory and fulfilling orders, which is not where the margins are.

InfoWorld: With the initial rise of e-business, everything seemed to have been focused on procurement and the buy side of b-to-b e-commerce . What will make people look harder at the sell side of that same equation?

Archer: For the last year and a half, we've seen this as the next frontier. I think the sell side is a much bigger opportunity. It's about keeping your customers. It's about revenue. It's about visibility. Over time, it's about getting much better connected to those customers while still using the distributors for what they're good for.

InfoWorld: How difficult is it to adopt a sell-side e-commerce application such as yours?

Archer: At Arch Chemical, we hit the schedule of 90 days and we didn't have to trim functionality. A big piece of that is the fact that we have built a lot of code that runs in the ERP system as well as the connectors. Typically most e-commerce vendors will install their applications, but when it comes time to hook them up to an SAP, J.D. Edwards, or whatever [application], they bring in integrators and consultants and start coding. In our case, we can literally install this stuff, depending on the readiness of the customer, in half a day to three days.

InfoWorld: How is that done?

Archer: Our methodology leverages extreme programming. We install the software and then put together a focus group with the business users and they'll see their customer data, their information going through screens as you put together orders and check account status and so forth. That helps them much more quickly decide what the customizations are that they want for their business. The project is then focused on doing things in a RAD extreme programming fashion using real feedback from the ultimate users of the system. So you get that feedback after a few days instead of after six months of implementation.

InfoWorld: What turned you on to extreme programming?

Archer: We were always focused on RAD, and extreme programming is really just another incarnation of that. The RAD methodology and the focus group methodology is very, very valuable, and in fact so valuable that we have customers such as Penzoil and Quaker State who like that methodology, and they're now using it to interact with their dealers. They get all the dealers in a room and they have a focus group going through how they want to better interact with the dealers down the road.

InfoWorld: How is that different from how things are typically done today?

Archer: It's about getting it right the first time. I've been in development for 20 years. When I started developing applications and system software, we would typically build Rev 1 based on some vague feedback from marketing and customers and we'd ship it. And developers are not going to sit around and wait for feedback because they're already cranking away on Rev 2 based on what they think is needed. Maybe by the time Rev 2 is halfway done, you'd start getting real feedback from the customers. But it was really Rev 3 before you had customer feedback into the product. With a RAD approach, you've now got the feedback very early. So when Rev 1 ships, you've got a bunch of customers who have already blessed it as something they can install and use. It's a very short-cycle, customer-driven approach. We're really ecstatic with the way that this has made us a more customer-centric business.

InfoWorld: Has all the hype on e-commerce helped put some focus on the inadequacies of most of the supply chains that exist today?

Archer: You can either view that as a giant "gotcha" or this as a great function forcing us to figure out what you need to fix in your company to be more competitive.

InfoWorld: Why do you think this area will remain an independent software category, as opposed to an element of an ERP or supply-chain solution?

Archer: You've got to buy into the idea that the ERP vendor's real value is on integrating internal processes. They're all aware that somehow there's something cooking that's more externally focused, but none of them have been particularly good at it. The ERP guys still haven't figured out how to make software that's self-service-oriented. In addition, you really need an architecture that sits between all that internal mess and the customers. The downstream evolution of all this is going to be that it's not just about front-ending my internal systems. It's about managing my content and my transactions to and through distributors and dealers out to the ultimate customers. ERP vendors are very weak at integrating with each other. Another reason that the ERP vendors are kind of boxing themselves out is that most of them have not created the multi-tier application server-type architecture that makes it easier to hook in multiple systems and create one interface down the channel and to the customer.

InfoWorld: Will Web services ease that integration challenge?

Archer: We think Web services is going to happen. Like most technology innovations, it's probably going take a little bit longer than most people think just because there's this great amount of inertia behind installed software. We're able to have our applications be a client to Web services today because our applications are written in Java. IBM has put a lot of the pieces that you need into the public domain. We load them into our project. We hook them up, and boom, we're there. The only problem is right now there's not a lot of Web services out there to be a client to.

InfoWorld: What are you most excited about at the moment?

Archer: We're getting a lot of stuff going on wireless, which had a slow start but lately seems to be accelerating. For the first time I'm seeing prospects who want to get started with wireless. Everybody is still in the pilot mode and maybe we'll roll it out in 2002. It would be nice to see the bandwidth increasing for wireless and the devices with full color and a nice screen and input capabilities that are now pushing $1,000 to get down to that $200 range. That will be a spark that will make some of those pilots turn into full-bore implementations.

InfoWorld: So what's your current assessment of the e-business revolution?

Archer: We're talking about the whole re-examination of supply chain. People have recognized that the Internet is not going to happen for them overnight, and that having the first-mover advantage isn't all that it's cracked up to be. To do it right is more important than to do it first. People are still enthused by it, but they want to have business practices that make sense alongside their technology investments. So they're just studying it a little more deeply and a little more rationally. There's much less, "Oh my God, Wall Street tells us we've got to have an e-business strategy. Let's go buy a whole lot of software and pay a Big Five consultant and have him come in and try to figure out what to do." People who put in e-commerce sites last year are focused this year on getting the usage higher. And there's a lot of interest around avoiding the double-entry problem. Distributors and dealers don't want to type in stuff twice.

The second big area that I'm seeing a lot of interest in is going global. Companies that last year were experimenting in different geographies, frequently with different technologies, are this year focusing on one implementation and one technology and how they make it spread globally.