E-Commerce in the US is currently in a huge expansion and the European market represents a natural target for this wave. Whilst this dominance is disturbing there is still a short window of opportunity for European telecommunication operators to become major E-Commerce actors in their respective markets but they must act very quickly.

Today most telecommunication operators are offering E-Commerce services and applications to their customers. High revenue is expected for investments in this emerging business. An increasing demand for having the possibility to customise the offered solutions to individual customer requirements can be observed. Nevertheless, customised E-Commerce applications are expensive and time consuming to implement. Even mid sized solutions often result in major effort and cost-risk, which can cancel the entire project.

Most E-Commerce applications consist of standardised components, having similar functionality. These building blocks, which have to be identified, could be used to build up an E-Commerce solution requiring considerably less effort than a completely new implementation.

The competitive nature of commerce and E-Commerce in general should not hide the fact that it is still a very small market in Europe today (early 2000). European telecommunication operators must position themselves clearly and some collaboration is needed to push and control the expansion of this market.

E-Commerce solutions become attractive for more and more companies. Nowadays simple solutions meet the requirements of those companies selling their products via the Internet. But times are changing fast in the Internet business, and it can be clearly seen that the current solutions will not fulfil the demands of tomorrow's customers, whereas "tomorrow" is to be interpreted in the straight way. New requirements like personalisation, mass customisation, or Enterprise Resource Planning – integration arise. Even with an increasing number of customers, telecommunication operators must be prepared to meet this challenge. A framework for interoperable and customised E-Commerce solutions has the potential to reduce costs and time needed for implementation as well as simplify customer care.

The general idea is to use focus areas as use cases in the construction of a framework providing a foundation for fast and reliable implementations of interoperable and customised E-Commerce solutions based on commercial components whenever possible. This framework will support the telecommunication operators in building tailored solutions based on the requirements of the customers in a cost efficient manner. Functional components and related constraints need to be identified and categorised in order to deliver interoperable and customised solutions quickly and cheaply.

After several months of experimentation and, sometimes, commercial exploitation of E-Commerce platforms by telecommunication operators, the following focus areas have shown technical and legal difficulties and need further study:

• Knowledge-based E-Commerce methods (data-mining, user profiling, mass customisation, interactive configuration),
• Micro-payment (mechanisms, security and authentication of transactions),
• Convergence of BtoB and BtoC applications,
• Interoperability of platforms and components.

The Project started in January 2000 and is due to conclude in December 2001.

Objectives

The main objectives of the Project are to:

• establish a standard for a framework (including a functional architecture and how to apply it) of E-Commerce platforms in order to quickly deploy and customise E-Commerce solutions,
• produce specifications for E-Commerce components interoperable across platforms to allow 1) end-to-end E-Commerce transactions on a global scale and 2) common exploitation of solutions by E-Commerce operators.

The key results will be a framework consisting in:

• a functional architecture for E-Commerce with a particular focus on the BtoB/BtoC convergence in order to save development costs for operators,
• E-Commerce components for existing platforms, which will be either enhanced or created, specified, procured and/or developed, with emphasis on the focus areas,
• recommendations for platform interoperability with actions undertaken in the appropriate standardisation bodies (CEN/ISSS, etc.).

The main users will be marketing departments of the EURESCOM Shareholders, driving the evolution of E-Commerce services and platforms. The results are also expected to increase the acceptance of E-Commerce services and the awareness of customers, both providers and consumers, by socialising the Project with a selection of national and international associations or SMEs and consumers. The results on platform functional architecture and interoperability will be used to influence the appropriate standards bodies.

The dissemination of results will be achieved through: