It’s bigger than anything else you have seen on the Net yet, and it’s as big as commerce can ever get. Pundits are calling it “the next frontier” and research groups are appearing to vie with one another to put out ever higher estimates on the exploding B2B, or business-to-business, market.
Each time a research group throws up a new estimate on the increasing possibilities in B2B, stocks of companies such as CommerceOne and Ariba race higher. When techno prophets tell the world about how XML, short for extensible markup language, is converging with some other technology to provide the backbone for B2B e-commerce, still some more stocks are pushed higher. Business prophets ponder questions such as how XML will impact existing businesses, how exactly the world of commerce will migrate online, which industries will be the earliest to do so, and all the time stocks rise higher and higher.

Mind you, this is all happening now. Back when B2B was still in the realm of the future, Asim Abdullah made some smart moves, which is why he is sitting pretty in Saratoga with some 1.8 million shares of CommerceOne, worth about $300 million.

E-commerce Evangelist

In 1996, Karachi-born Abdullah was working at Taligent, an alliance between Apple, Hewlett-Packard and IBM that was later abandoned. Sensing the hopelessness of it all, Abdullah hopped on to the nonprofit bandwagon of CommerceNet, an organization funded by the US government’s Department of Commerce to help societies transition to e-commerce.

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