After Eutilia… sadly, BT Transact will cease all operations by mid-year 2007. The decision was taken some time ago, but is now official on their website: As many, BT Transact didn’t find anyway to reach the ‘critical mass’ fast enough and to reach profitability. Too many players; no differentiator; too costly and complex; not attractive enough…
BT Transact was a pioneer in the B2B e-Marketplace world. One of the last horizontal survivor as well. So far, you could read on their website:
BT launched the first marketplace of its kind outside of the US and was instrumental in the first global transaction between eMarketplaces.
In addition, we offer proven connections, content and trading services and maintain the latest standards, while always ensuring that our services reflect the needs of our customers.
To verify our claims, we recommend that you simply talk to our customers. After all, they include 80 per cent of the FTSE 100 companies and 20 of the top 50 Fortune 500 companies.
Source: BT Transact website
As BT (Transact) is not giving much information about their decision, if you want to know more, I suggest you to read what Manoj Ranaweera wrote here on his blog.
If anyone has further details, he is welcome to comment.
Thanks Jean-Philippe. From the two key reasons, technology platform became the ultimate killer. Oracle stopped developing it further 18 months ago, according to source within BT. I have heard about Barclays Bank spending several 100 millions a year maintaining legacy systems, which they have to in order to serve their customers and protect thier deposits. In the case of BT, they were providing a service, therefore could exit without damaging the brand. If the business generated sufficient profit (I guess it was most likely running at a loss), they could have hired a team to takeover the product from Oracle for continuous development, or rewrite it completely using low cost labour. And the third was that the business no longer aligned with corporate goals, and was simply treated as a product hosted by their data centre business.
Hey Manoj, do you know where customers went? Have they joined Marrakech, cc-Hubwoo, Perfect or decided to proceed with a private solution?