I chatted this morning with an old contact, Erik Huddleston, the founder and CTO at BetweenMarkets, an Austin-based software company. Their focus is on improving business partner trading relationships, through what they call Trading Partner Business Intelligence. The skinny is that they have developed a way to describe the meaning of all the information flowing from partner to partner as part of the value chain. These can be related to the specific parts of business processes, or business goals. As a result, the appearance (or absence) of specific information can be interpreted relative to its true business impacts. Pretty heady stuff.

Erik says they now do alerting through .NET alerts and email, and haven't yet integrated IM into the picture, although he has designed the hooks to be able to do it, and all the necessary information is present in the data model -- user identities, roles, etc.

The principal marketing technique is viral: as one partner adopts the technology, they bring partners in, who do the same, and so on. What is also interesting is that those suppliers who have adopted the technology are moving to differentiate themselves because of the technology and the resulting efficiencies related to its use. A winning model.