Water Cooler: Getting in on the auction action
By Bob Brown
Network World, 11/29/99

I like to duck cold calls from public relations people as much as the next journalist, but I recently gave in to the people at Andale, a new company that wants to handle the back-end data management chores for companies and individuals that participate in multiple auctions at once.

At first glance, I couldn't figure out why network professionals at large companies would care about this sort of technology. After all, Andale's initial target audience is individuals and small businesses that conduct bunches of auctions simultaneously on sites such as eBay.

But Andale CEO Munjal Shah expects his company will be working with bigger companies before long. He suggests that if large enterprises aren't figuring out how to take advantage of auction technologies yet, they should get going.

He anticipates that large companies, say large shoe manufacturers or network equipment makers, may initially want to start running auctions on their own Web sites to get rid of slow-moving inventory (vendors such as Moai Technologies offer tools for building such auctions). But he says that companies will likely move on from these auctions to auctioning off stuff on multiple business-to-business e-commerce sites. This, by the way, is where Andale would come in. Rather than having your company manage all the customer relations and back-end data involved in running auctions across multiple sites, Andale would offer a Web-based service to take the chores off your hands.

George Zachary, a general partner with Mohr, Davidow Ventures and a member of Andale's board, says one of the reasons his firm invested in Andale is that he believes online auctions and exchanges are becoming ever more relevant to large firms. "The volume that businesses will sell through these Internet auctions/exchanges will be big," he predicts. And he warns that the challenge of managing multiple auctions could be daunting.

This all makes sense to me. You're only going to get so many people to visit your own e-commerce site, so you might as well figure out ways to market your merchandise as widely as you can. Of course, the more distributed your marketing and sales channels become, the bigger network and data management challenge you're going to have to deal with.

My suggestion: Before your company's marketing and sales departments start going nuts with online auctions you might be wise to start thinking through how your network and IS departments would handle these activities. Lots of auctions could mean lots more e-mail into your company from prospective buyers as well as lots more sales-related data to sort and store. If you wait too long to bone up on the potential impact of auctions on your company and your department, the chance to take control of the situation could be "Going, going, gone" before you know it.

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