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 COLUMN
RosettaNet decodes long-lost secrets of internetworking IN THE RECENT MOVIE The Mummy, the ancient Egyptian High Priest Imhotep returns to life, visiting plagues of locusts, blood, and fire on a hapless populace. It's only when a clever librarian decodes an ancient inscription -- suspiciously similar to the Rosetta stone -- that our heroes discover how to put an end to the mummy's curse.
But the curse of the PC industry may be lifted through the efforts of RosettaNet, a consortium that is busy deciphering the industry's inner workings. The lifting of this curse may be hardly visible to the crowd filling New York's Javits Convention Center for PC Expo this week. But it is certain to transform the PC industry. RosettaNet (www.rosettanet.org) was founded one year ago and is led by CEO Fadi Chehadé. Its goal is nothing less than the creation of an electronic-commerce standard to unify the PC industry's business processes. Earlier this month, the consortium launched the implementation phase of its project, called eConcert, and plans to have the system fully operational by Feb. 2, 2000. Once complete, every PC manufacturer, distributor, and reseller involved in RosettaNet will use the same standards to encode product catalog data, to exchange purchase orders, or to coordinate product launches. Each interaction is defined in a set of "partner interface processes," which describe in great detail not only transactions but business rules and models as well. Getting everything to work together between dozens of companies is such a complex act of coordination that RosettaNet refers to the companies involved in the pilot phase as "dance partners." The remarkable thing about RosettaNet is that it has brought so many competitors together on the same platform. Manufacturers such as Compaq and Hewlett-Packard, resellers such as Insight and CompUSA, and software vendors such as Microsoft and Netscape have put aside their differences to sit down together on the RosettaNet board. What's motivating the lion to lie down with the lamb? Fear, mostly: Doing business on the Internet demands a high degree of speed and efficiency, and companies that are still processing orders by fax and by phone will be left behind as their customers move online. Other industries can learn much from the RosettaNet example. (Chehadé said he's already received inquiries from companies in a wide variety of manufacturing industries, but he's concentrating on PCs for now.) Lesson one: You can't internetwork without cooperation. Lesson two: Internetworking applications aren't just about changing your company's interface to the rest of the world. They require reworking business processes from the ground up to integrate them, over the Internet, with your company's partners. Lesson three: If you wait for the Internet to come to you, it will be too late. Band together now with your company's partners -- and perhaps even its competitors -- to build an internetworking consortium before someone else does. What other secrets does RosettaNet reveal? Write to me at dylan@infoworld.com. Dylan Tweney is the content development manager for InfoWorld.com. He has been writing about the Internet since 1993. SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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