E-business collaboration, otherwise termed as c-commerce, a breakthrough concept during the e-business boom of the past, is making a comeback. The reason, despite the widespread disillusionment with everything e-, many business and technical leaders are beginning to understand and achieve the value associated with e-business collaboration, whether it is to improve the revenue and operational capabilities or fundamentally transform their businesses. This understanding and experience coupled with the pressure to improve financial results, is helping e-business occupy the center stage.

Businesses today have to leverage on their existing capabilities and acquire new capabilities in order to address competition and ensure sustained growth. They need to look at the various possibilities to reduce the cycle time of every business process to deliver maximum value. Value creation, in any business, does not depend only on the organization's internal capabilities; rather it also depends on the capabilities of every trading partner across the value chain. Thus, organizations have to not only improve their internal capabilities, but also need to understand and assess the value created and added at every stage, by each trading partner (suppliers, logistics, manufacturers, marketing, sales, customer service etc.) throughout the value chain (i.e., supply and demand chain). In brief, organizations should put efforts to achieve total value chain optimization for better value creation and to deliver customer delight. Value chain optimization calls for extensive information and resource sharing among all the trading partners to collaborate by integrating their information systems while also synchronizing their operations. In business parlance, this is also called as `Collaborative Commerce'.

According to the global research agency Gartner, c-commerce¹ is a new business model, driven by exploding business demands and opportunities and enabled by Internet and integration technologies. "... Collaborative Commerce (c-commerce), achieves dynamic collaboration among employees, business partners and customers throughout a trading community or market. In c-commerce, enterprises harness the full potential of the Internet to gain revenue and profits improvement by going beyond rigid supply chain models and simple information sharing." Another definition portrays c-commerce as `leveraging new technologies to enable complex, cross-enterprise business processes, allowing entire value chains to share decision-making, workflow, and information.' From these definitions, we sum up that c-commerce is a set of electronically enabled collaborative interaction between an enterprise, its suppliers, trading partners, customers and employees.

Global CEO Magazine, Collaborative Commerce, E-business Collaboration, Integration Technologies, Internet Technologies, Information Systems, Decision Making Process, C-Commerce, Product Lifecycle Management, Customer Resource Management, Enterprise Application Integration, E-Commerce, Web Technologies.