Five major aerospace and defense manufacturers — BAE Systems, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Rolls Royce — launched Exostar in 2000, at the peak of the dot-com bubble. At that time, recalls Exostar Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Development Peter Scott, the organization's emphasis was on enabling business-to-business electronic commerce transactions, not on supporting complex, collaborative business processes, such as those that make up the Boeing 787 supply chain.
"At that time, the thought was that everyone needed an e-commerce business strategy," Scott recalls. "Our idea was to share the risk and cost of setting up e-commerce infrastructure among several partners."
To that end, Exostar initially focused on building a secure network that partners could use to support purchase orders, invoices, and other transactions. The approach has attracted many aerospace and defense OEMs and their suppliers. Last year, Exostar's manufacturing customers and their suppliers accounted for 10 million transactions and $35 billion worth of goods and services.
A couple of years ago, however, Exostar and its founding companies decided that transactions weren't enough. As manufacturers such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin began to work more collaboratively with customers and suppliers, Exostar looked to support those business processes. "We realized that pushing and pulling data back and forth between enterprise domains was OK, but we really needed to define business processes between multiple partners and support multi-enterprise collaboration," Scott says.
Exostar decided to partner with independent software vendors to provide that business process support. Initially, the company linked up with Commerce One — which later was acquired by Perfect Commerce — for supplier relationship management applications. In the fall 2005, Exostar replaced Commerce One with E2Open, which supports lifecycle order management, supply and demand synchronization, and inventory and logistics applications on a hosted basis. Exostar also partnered with Emptoris Inc. for contract and supply management applications.
Exostar, Scott says, plans to sell those applications on an on-demand basis to the 34,000 trading partners now signed up to use its network.