Gene Alvarez

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Gene Alvarez
Research VP
11 years at Gartner
28 years IT industry

Gene Alvarez is a VP in the Gartner CRM Research organization. Mr. Alvarez has more than 23 years of IT experience in business impact assessment, vendor management, project management, software development and delivery of complex...Read Full Bio

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The Changing E-Commerce Landscape – IBM and Sterling Commerce

by Gene Alvarez  |  May 24, 2010  |  2 Comments

Over the past month there have been several announcements in the E-Commerce market. These announcements range from vendor partnerships such as demandware’s Link partner community to the purchase of minority a interest in a competitor such as  GSI Commerce’s deal with Intershop Communications AG, and more. However, the biggest to date is IBM’s announcement to purchase Sterling Commerce for 1.4B in cash.

Gartner is already working on a consolidated response to this event. However for the e-commerce market this is an interesting event from two points of view.

The first one is that two e-commerce Magic Quadrant vendors are consolidating into one (IBM a leader and Sterling Commerce a Challenger). Provided the deal closes without any interference, this event could signal other acquisitions of smaller e-commerce vendors by larger vendors. I believe that these acquisitions will seek to take advantage of the growing e-commerce market as organizations make investments in the web sales capabilities.

Secondarily, the e-commerce market is evolving and this evolution is well beyond those changes driven by a desire for new user experiences such as social software and mobile (more research on this coming out soon). This evolution includes much more than business-to-consumer functionality; it includes global business-to-business e-commerce with industries such as manufacturing, distribution and telecommunications seeking to improve their online self-service sales capabilities. This is where this deal will be one to watch in 2010 and beyond.

Can we see another Dot.com 2.0 with plenty of e-commerce announcements in 2010 and beyond? Yes! We still have Internet Retailer and our Gartner CRM Summit events in June. So stay tuned.

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2 responses so far ↓

  • 1 More Musings on IBM (Cast Iron + Sterling Commerce)   May 25, 2010 at 8:49 pm

    [...] ME-BPP, CSB, et al — Gene Alvarez just blogged on some of the Apps / Ecommerce considerations here), and my colleagues and I are now collaborating to sort all that out. Stay tuned. [ Hmmm... [...]

  • 2 IBM acquires Sterling Commerce from AT&T   May 26, 2010 at 12:00 pm

    [...] bombshell fell this week.  Several of my colleagues have blogged on this already, namely Gene Alvarez (representing e-Commerce) and Benoit Lheureux (representing B2B integration).  Both provide some [...]