Founders and Leadership
CommerceOne was founded in 1994 as DistriVision by Tom Gonzales and his son, Thomas Gonzales Jr. The company was renamed Commerce One in 1997 after Mark Hoffman became CEO. Mark Hoffman was a co-founder of Sybase Inc. and brought significant experience from his time building Sybase into a major database software company from 1984 to 1995.
WI Harper’s Involvement
Peter Liu, founder and chairman of WI Harper Group, was an investor in CommerceOne. WI Harper Group lists CommerceOne (NASDAQ:CMRC) among their successful exits, alongside other notable investments like DivX, Creative Technology, and Intraware. Peter Liu has personally invested in over 100 high tech companies in Greater China and has a proven track record of creating value for LPs, with his investments including CommerceOne among many other publicly listed companies.
Company History
Early Years (1994-1997) Founded as DistriVision Development Corp., the firm first focused on selling office automation software to banks. By the time Mark Hoffman was named president and CEO in 1996, it had also moved into multimedia catalog development. Hoffman secured more than $7 million in financial backing and brought in new managers, some from Sybase, to steer DistriVision’s transformation into Commerce One the next year.
IPO and Dot-Com Boom Success (1999-2001) In July 1999, on its first trading day after its initial public offering, the company’s stock price rose 190%. At the peak of the dot-com bubble, the company had a market capitalization of $21.5 billion.
Major Acquisitions and Partnerships In January 1999, the company acquired Veo Systems from Asim Abdullah for $300 million. In November 1999, the company acquired CommerceBid from Ramesh Balwani for $4.5 million in cash and 785,000 shares. In September 2000, the company acquired AppNet for $1.6 billion in stock.
Covisint and Automotive Industry Success In December 2000, the company formed Covisint with Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Daimler AG, Renault, and Nissan. Ford and General Motors each received 14.4 million shares of Commerce One and Commerce One owned 2% of Covisint. One of Commerce One’s largest exchange projects was Covisint, the online marketplace for the worldwide automotive industry launched in November of 2000.
SAP Partnership The Commerce One/SAP partnership announced in 2000, called for 14 joint engineering teams representing 400 personnel. As part of the deal, SAP also provided $250 million in cash in exchange for a 4% equity stake. Commerce One enjoyed an unprecedented level of fame in 2000, speaking at almost every supply chain and B2B e-commerce conference, including its own event, which attracted 2500 attendees.
Core Business and Technology
B2B E-Commerce Platform Commerce One built business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce exchanges that allowed companies to do business via the World Wide Web or other electronic platforms. The idea behind these exchanges was to cut costs for all parties involved by creating a single place where buyers, sellers, distributors, and suppliers could complete commerce transactions.
Technology Innovation The company’s technologies included Schema for Object-Oriented XML (SOX), an XML schema technology that influenced the development of the W3C’s XML Schema language and the Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB).