Enterprise E-Commerce: The Software Component Breakthrough for Business-To-Business Commerce

A holistic view of technology and business comments on the concepts, jargon, strategies, scalability, interoperability, adapability, and integration of applications, markets, and customer service.

Peter Fingar is one of the industry's noted experts in component-based electronic commerce and an internationally recognized author. He is Technology Advocate for EC Cubed where he provides leadership, technology direction and liaison with industry standards organizations and strategic technology and business partners. He has held technical and management positions with GTE Data Services, the Arabian American Oil Company, American Software and Computer Services, and Perot Systems' Technical Resource Connection. He served as Director of Information Technology for the University of Tampa and as an object technology consultant for IBM Global Services. Peter has written six books on computing, presented conference papers worldwide, and published numerous professional articles in CIO Magazine, Component Strategies, Object Magazine, SunWorld Online and Datamation. He taught graduate and undergraduate university computing studies in the United States and Saudi Arabia. As a practitioner, his systems development experience was gained in diverse industries and spans technology generations from unit-record to Web Object Computing. He has played an active role in promoting the commercial applications of object-oriented and intelligent agent technology for competitive advantage. Peter is a long standing member of the IEEE Computer Society and the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), and assists the Object Management Group with its representation in the Middle East.

Harsha Kumar is co-founder of EC Cubed and serves as the Director, Product Strategy. His current responsibilities include driving technology strategy and alliances, as well as product roadmap for EC Cubed. He is a frequent speaker at professional conferences relating to e-Commerce technology. Harsha was responsible for crystallizing EC Cubed's vision of "application components" into the ecWorksTM suite by driving and leading the product specification, design and development functions. Mr. Kumar also worked with clients on their e-Commerce strategies and implementations, including GE Capital Vendor Financial Services, TransAmerica Leasing and the Gartner Group. He plays an advisory role in the CommerceNet Catalog Inter-Operability Pilot project. While at GE Capital, Mr. Kumar was a Lead Architect on the industry's first B-to-G.com, "SourceOnline." He has worked in several R&D organizations including Bellcore and the HCI Lab at the University of Maryland. While at Bellcore, Mr. Kumar developed supply chain applications for inventory planning and replenishment for the Bell companies. His work with Prof. Ben Shneiderman on hierarchical visualizations has been published in international journals. Mr. Kumar received a Bachelor of Technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, and an MS in Systems Engineering from the University of Maryland.

Tarun Sharma is co-founder of EC Cubed and serves as Director, Product Management. His current responsibilities include technology alliances and evangelism of component-based computing architectures for e-Commerce. Mr. Sharma is an authority on component technologies and has been published widely in professional magazines. He has co-authored another book, Programming Web Components, published by McGraw-Hill (1997). Tarun is a popular speaker at professional conferences on e-Commerce and related technologies. He also represents EC Cubed at the Object Management Group. At EC Cubed, he has led client projects ranging from strategy, to implementation and rollout for several large-scale business-to-business initiatives. These include GE's TPN Register content aggregation portal, MasterCard's Commercial Card Gateway and American Express' @Work customer self-service portal. Prior to EC Cubed, Tarun developed portions of GE Capital's "SourceOnline," the industry's first B-to-G.com. While at ICL, Tarun developed financial applications for companies including the National Commercial Bank (Jamaica) and the Caribbean Development Bank (Barbados). Earlier, he taught Computer Science courses at NIIT and worked as a researcher on Artificial Intelligence-based Natural Language Processing at C-DAC, Pune, India. Mr. Sharma received his Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Science from the Pune Institute of Computer Technology.