Edgewater Pushes Vertical Limits Of Web Services

Peter Dupre, Edgewater's new chief technical strategist, joined the company as a part-marketing, part-technical manager working with CTO Dave Clancy to help with Edgewater's Web services initiatives and vertical opportunities in the midmarket.

"It's interesting that the e-commerce space and the Web services space are colliding at the moment," Dupre said. "People are revisiting commerce for the first time in 18 months, trying to add more transactions to their sites and looking to develop forward-looking technologies."

In particular, Dupre said he's seeing traction with Microsoft's .Net-enabled Web services products, Content Management Server, Commerce Server and BizTalk. He is also impressed with IBM's WebSphere product line.

"Companies are looking back again at the customer-facing applications and the opportunity to connect with suppliers on the back end of e-commerce," Dupre said. "So they are really trying to add more transactions to their sites and considering looking at development with technologies like Web services and .Net."

According to IDC, Web services implementations are gaining credibility. The research firm forecasts that Web services-based professional services spending will reach $453 million this year and increase to more than $1.2 billion by 2003. Compared to growth in related software and hardware, the professional services space has the longest-term positive impact, IDC says.

Dave Gallo, Edgewater's COO, points to ongoing work the integrator is doing for the administration department of a large university as an example. Edgewater is building a Web-enabled solution that provides services, including financial aid and loan processing, from students' desktops.

"Again, we're integrating it with back-end systems through an object-oriented system we built to improve their services," he said. "That's something we're seeing as a key issue for the administrative side of higher education."

Edgewater is also extending the solution through the Web so that students can conduct self-service transactions. "Organizations are looking to tap the untapped value in the systems they already have," Dupre said.

Edgewater is working with complementary partners to target other vertical markets, Gallo said. For example, the integrator partners with Carlsbad, Calif.-based Document Sciences to deliver solutions to customers in the insurance, financial services and health-care fields.

"Over the next couple of years, we will see more insurance companies making sure they do all their billing over the Web and collect payments over the Web," Gallo said. "Those systems already exist, but they're not pushed out to the people."

Jack McGannon, CEO of Document Sciences, said the company's application-development tools for print, Web and e-mail delivery of automated, personalized content integrate well with Edgewater's focus on midmarket e-commerce solutions.

Insurance is a particularly attractive vertical, according to a spending profile recently published by Forrester Research that suggests that insurance companies are more likely than average to increase their IT budgets during the second half of 2002.

Along with the content management is the demand for insurance adjusters and inspectors to have mobile capabilities in the field, Gallo said.

"The technology is now mainstream," he said. "And there's a huge [return on investment on that because they can get the information in quicker and more efficiently and not have to reprocess it."