Are they developing channels or even other distributed processes, like The Choice Hotel, for example?
Kovacs: That’s right. The Choice Hotel has a franchise of EconoLodge, Clarion, and Rodeway Inn [hotels], so they have something like 400,000 hotel rooms under management. They wanted a single place where all of their hotels could log in and purchase products, whether it’s paper towels, sheets, TVs, [or] mattresses. So their initial thing was, this is a buy-side marketplace. When they went out to all the suppliers, they quickly realized the problem is not on the buy side, because we control the buy side. It’s on the sell side; it’s getting all these vendors to put information in, having multivendor catalogs. It’s collaborative commerce, so they’re using us for that. InfoWorld: There’s a handful of these sell-side applications out there, like Calico and Ironside, so what differentiates Comergent? Kovacs: If you look at most of our competitors, they started as business-to-consumer. So it was, “I want to create an Amazon. I want to take my charge card, go to the Web, and buy a product.” We
