By Erin Chu

SELLING is probably the ultimate business of any business. This was somewhat muddled during the heyday of the dotcoms, when priorities seemed to be obtaining venture capital funding and hitting the IPO jackpot.

Chairman of the Singapore mainboard-listed Internet Technology Group (ITG) Koh Boon Hwee, said it was unfortunate the start-up phase of the Internet has been associated with a lot of "excessive exuberance".

"The Internet is an important tool, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do. It will turn out to be more important than the PC was to businesses in the seventies," he said.

With the sobering of investors and the softening of the economy, businesses are going back to fundamentals. At least two companies are providing "sell-side" solutions to help their customers.

Back-to-basics

Based in Singapore, newly-launched iGine Pte Ltd offers a suite of collaborative e-commerce sofiware that lets users keep in sync with their direct, indirect and virtual sales force. It also provides support for sales and marketing efforts.

CEO of iGine, Tan Chang Huong, sees this as relatively uncharted waters. As opposed to cutting costs to improve efficiency which has a bottom limit, he believes the only sustainable way for a company to grow is to increase revenue and market share.

Not all markets in the world are homogenous and a large portion of business conducted is done through indirect channels and with alliance partners.

"Our software enables enterprises to conduct e-commerce and support collaborative sales and marketing models in business operations, thereby improving operation efficiencies and increasing revenues," he said.

Market research firm, the Gartner Group, reckoned collaborative-commerce or c-commerce iniatiatives involving Web-enabled interaction between enterprises, their customers, trading partners and employees will surpass e-commerce as a top business priority in the next 12 months.

Incorporated in March last year with start-up capital of S$1.1 million, iGine has among its customers Sun Microsystems, APWTrade, Freshworks Asia, Amedz and the PSA. Target industries include the manufacturing, retail, life sciences, telecommunications, financial, transportation and petrochemical sectors.

Staff strength stands at 47 of which 42 are technical people. The company’s core technical expertise lies in Java, EJB (Enterprise Java Beans), XML (Extensible Markup Language), SCM (Supply Chain Management) systems, EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) and data warehousing.

It closed its first round of funding in October last year with investment from Fresh Chilli, Frontline Technologies Holdings and Walden International.

Tan revealed that the company is hovering at the break-even point. It has a constant revenue stream, with 70 percent of its revenue coming from professional services and 30 percent from software licensing. Tan hopes to tilt this towards a 40 percent professional services and 60 percent software licensing mix eventually. The company hopes to achieve profitability by year's end.

Going forward, the company plans to work with solution integrators in the region and globally. Its solutions are also available on the Application Services Provider (ASP) model.

Acknowledging that sell-side solutions are only a part of e-commerce, Tan has plans to build partnerships with companies that have complimentary products to provide customers with a more complete offering.

Demand Chain Management

Formerly Jatis Solutions Pte Ltd, Firium Solutions (Asia Pacific) Pte Ltd has garnered fresh funding from the 3i Group and ITG.

3i followed up its US$2 million investment in the company last year with another US$2.6 million, while ITG pumped in US$5.9 million for the first time, making it a total of US$8.5 million. The funds will be used for regional expansion, recruitment and acquisition purposes.

The company relocated its headquarters from Indonesia to Singapore last year. It bills itself as a business technologist focusing on Demand Chain Management (DCM) solutions for the financial services and retail/distribution services sectors in Asia-Pacific. Its competencies include e-business consulting, systems integration and software development.

According to president and CEO, Jusuf Sjariffudin, DCM is not just about creating demand and then managing and responding to it. He defines DCM as including the integration of all internal business processes and supportive collaboration of all demand chain partners, including distributors, resellers, retailers, to generate revenue and enhance business results.

Research firm DC estimated that the worldwide market for demand and supply chain services are expected to grow from US$25.3 billion in 1999 to US$139.8 billion by end 2004. An integral part of DCM, the customer relationship management (CRM) market in turn is projected to be worth more than US$22 billion by 2003.

"The business trend is shifting from supply chain management or SCM, which focuses on reducing internal costs to DCM, which aims to generate revenue through creating demand. While businesses will continue to need SCM solutions such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), order processing and stock control applications, there will be an increased importance on DCM applications for business intelligence, CRM, personalization and data-mining," said Koh.

Since its establishment in 1997, Firium has been growing at an average of 140 percent over the past 3 years. Growth reached 200 percent last year. However, due to the relocation and expansion, there was a slight operating loss last year, Sjariffudin revealed. The company is targeting to be profitable within this year.

It has among its customers ABN Amro, Motorola, Prudential and SurfGold.com. The company also works with partners like BEA Systems, EXE Technologies, i2, Microsoft, Onyx Software and Sun Microsystems.

The company has offices in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia housing more than 200 staff. On its expansion plans, Sjariffudin said: "We are targeting strategic acquisitions in new markets such as Thailand and the Philippines this year."