"mySAP.com Marketplace™s are a business community portal and business transaction hub. It allows buyers and sellers to come together to exchange goods, services, and information. The mySAP.com Marketplace™ is an open Internet Web community offering the opportunity to collaborate, conduct commerce, access personalized content, and interact in professional communities. The Marketplace™ provides the complete infrastructure, security, commerce-enabling applications, and interoperability required to enable one-step business anytime, anywhere, with anyone."

What does it look like? Screen dump.

The Marketplace™ will provide:

• The complete infrastructure, security, commerce-enabling applications, value-added services, and interoperability required to enable one-step business anytime, anywhere, with anyone

• Distinctive trading communities, bringing together companies and their industry and regional partners

  • A cross-industry horizontal Marketplace™ as the basis for collaborative commerce for business professionals in general

  • A number of vertical and regional Marketplace™s for specialized commerce among groups users with similar interests, such as the oil and gas industry

• Aggregated and unique content for all business professionals as well as specific industry participants

The cross-industry Marketplace™ will offer horizontal applications, such as auctions, spot-market buying, and RFP or RFQ matching. These horizontal applications apply across industries. They involve trading in indirect goods and services, in general content (news, company profiles, stock quotes, and so on), and horizontal business forums (such as HR). The vertical and regional Marketplace™s will offer specialized applications tailored to the membership group. The vertical applications feature commerce in goods and services unique to an industry (such as local suppliers for regional Marketplace™s) as well as industry-specific content and communities. All users of the global Marketplace™ can access and personalize the available communities and content. Some industry- or region-specific functions may be based upon membership.