B2B Opportunities with Microsoft

VetMall.com is based entirely on Microsoft technologies, including the BackOffice Family and Microsoft Visual Studio®. "We had in-house experience with Microsoft Windows NT®, and we liked the integration of development tools and the way Microsoft technologies are easily deployed," says Liao.
Phase two, in development now, connects the veterinarians to the distributor. "Vets will be able to better communicate with their distributors and conduct business," says Miller. "They can offer products directly to their clients without storage or inventory costs. Distributors will be able to accurately forecast inventory needs, reducing warehousing costs. VetMall will also provide order receiving capabilities, e-mail accounts, Accounts Payable/Receivable functions, account tracking and maintenance, and advertising to the veterinarians."
Phase three will extend VetMall.com's reach by including the manufacturing community. VetMall will serve as the marketplace for manufacturers to receive orders from the distributors, negotiate pricing, and plan production for their products.
"We wanted to provide a simple way for manufacturers and distributors to join in VetMall, and we see XML documents as a better way than COM to ease the pain of EDI," says Liao. "Using BizTalk, they can send us their transaction format and we can facilitate e-commerce transactions by providing the mapping and pushing it back out."
VetMall uses the Commerce Interchange Pipeline component of Microsoft Site Server Commerce Edition, which supports XML, to facilitate data exchange over the Internet. Their four Windows NT Server–based servers and Microsoft SQL Server™–based databases are hosted by Data Return Corporation, a Microsoft Certified Solution Provider and specialist in advanced hosting services for the Microsoft platform. "Our Integration Server is our communications vehicle, which communicates with an Integration Server at Butler," says Liao. "When we get an order from a veterinarian, we wrap the XML document with Microsoft Message Queuing and push it to Butler's Integration Server. It doesn't matter how often they sweep their server, the orders will be queued up waiting to go.
"We believe SQL Server 7.0 Enterprise Edition is infinitely scalable, so that as we grow we can plug in as many machines as we need," continues Liao. "We really like the auto memory feature, which reduces our overhead."