Mr. Cassidy: Internet Commerce Corporation was formed in April 1997 as a majority owned subsidiary of another company called Infosafe System Inc. Since that time the company has merged into the parent and we have changed the name from Infosafe to Internet Commerce Corporation. We started off with a basic concept of becoming a business-to-business network to connect large companies to their suppliers. For example, when Barnes & Noble orders books from Random House they transmit those orders electronically through our network which primarily uses the Internet as the underlying carrier. These two companies pay us for the traffic or the amount of data that goes over our secure network. ICC has as customers such as Mack Trucks, Revlon, CVS and Staples that use us for those kinds of services. We have grown from a business plan to sales of about 1 million a month right now.
TWST: Do all companies use some service of this type, and if they don't
use your company what other avenues do they have?
Mr. Cassidy: Electronic commerce has been around for about 30 years and
value added networks have carried that data up until the explosion of
Internet. Those networks are run by large companies and telcos. Sterling
Commerce is a competitor in this space, GXS which used to be part of
General Electric, IBM, AT&T and others. There are currently about
400,000 large customers of those networks in the United States.
Generally when big companies order items they do so electronically. A
company like J.C. Penney issues a couple of million purchase orders
every month. Obviously they're not going to put those purchase orders in
envelopes; instead, they transmit them.
Tickers included in this excerpt: ICCA
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