AIIA announces new e-commerce task forceThe Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) has established a Privacy and Consumer Taskforce, with the aim of increasing consumer confidence in e-commerce. According to the AIIA Web site, the taskforce has been established to ensure the information industry is well positioned to shape important developments. The task force's agenda will be guided by participating AIIA members and will focus on providing education, influencing public policy, and assisting member companies with implementation and compliance. The move reflects the AIIA's manifesto to work with the community to create a climate of mutual understanding, which will facilitate successful investment in information industry opportunities and encourage local developments in e-commerce.e-business alliance forgedIBM has announced an alliance with electronic-business applications provider Vignette Software. In the deal, Vignette will offer the V/5 E-business suite of applications for integration with IBM's WebSphere platform. The Vignette products are aimed to ease high-volume transaction exchanges with shared suppliers and partners running their businesses over the Web, along with decreased time to deployment for Net-based applications. Mike Vollman, senior vice president for sales, services, and alliances at Vignette, said in order to accomplish this task, that Vignette would divest itself from developing some technologies and instead take on IBM products. He listed IBM's messaging products and some load balancing middleware features as two of the concessions.www.vignette.come-commerce offeringAT&T and Hewlett-Packard have announced plans to offer products and services to companies trying to create and manage complex electronic-commerce projects. The products and services will be aimed at traditional bricks-and-mortar companies, especially those that operate internationally, and rapidly growing dot-com companies, HP and AT&T officials said. The alliance involves HP and AT&T Solutions, the managed networking and professional services subsidiary of AT&T.
AT&T Solutions for years has offered companies outsourced and partially outsourced network management services through its Global Enterprise Management System (GEMS) platform, which includes HP's OpenView. The collaboration extends GEMS' services to include the ability to monitor and manage applications running on the network.
