Federal Agency Adds Personalization To Massive E-Commerce Site

A team headed by Computer Technology Associates (CTA), an e-business solution provider to the federal marketplace, is nearing the completion of revamping the largest B2B e-commerce site in the world.

The team, which includes Sybase, BroadVision and Verity, is providing e-business integration for the U.S. General Services Administration's (GSA) Federal Supply Service (FSS) division.

The FSS division helps federal agencies throughout the world acquire supplies, furniture, computers, tools and equipment. One way it does this is through its e-procurement site, called GSAAdvantage.gov (Advantage). The site gives 80,000 to 100,000 registered government buyers access to nearly 1 million items from 2,000 suppliers.

According to the GSA, the Advantage site currently has annual revenue of $100 million. This makes it the No. 1 site in the world in terms of dollar volume, according to Robert Breton, senior director of the Enterprise Solutions Division for Sybase.

The site was created in 1995 by CTA, a systems integrator with headquarters in Bethesda, Md. Now the legacy site is undergoing an overhaul that will include a more robust portal-based architecture that includes more scalability, more availability and more security features.

But according to Mark Phillips, executive vice president of CTA, perhaps the key requirement was for mass customization and personalization capability. "One of the unique things about Advantage is the breadth of clients and the breadth of products it encompasses," says Phillips, who guides CTA's e-procurement offerings for the public sector. "I don't know there's a marketplace out there that can offer more kinds of products and services, and because of that, you have a lot of different users. So customization and personalization become more important."

Personalization has been an important ingredient of many B2C sites, but Phillips says this might be the first significant B2B implementation of personalization features.

"In the federal buying environment, I believe this is the first significant product launch with this type of functionality," says Phillips. "In the federal space, customization and personalization features are going to be driving requirements for all the intergovernmental apps you're going to see because of how many user classes there are."

Some of those classes, he says, include buyers, browsers, shoppers and contracting officers. "Clearly, there's an opportunity to serve up information to them based on buying histories," says Phillips. "Any site can be clearly more effective if it serves up information tailored to your history of buying. From there, it doesn't take much to envision cross-buying."

CTA is using BroadVision's products to deliver a personalized interactive Web infrastructure with Verity's search technology Sybase Enterprise Portal, which will allow the GSA to integrate with buyers' back-end systems as well as with other divisions of GSA.

According to Phillips, the project represents its first portal implementation. Asked why Sybase's portal technology was chosen, he says, "As a middleware vendor who's come to the portal marketplace, Sybase brings a lot to the party. It's a true portal, and it allows us to tie in to a lot of back-end systems and a lot of back-end databases." That Advantage was also built on a Sybase RDBMS was also key, he adds.

The site will be completed on schedule "in the next couple of weeks," says Phillips, but because there is a buying surge in the August/September time frame, he anticipates many customers will continue to use the existing site and then switch over to the new site in October.

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