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Covisint.com

Covisint is a leading e-marketplace that provides interoperability solutions for users in automobile, healthcare and public sectors. It was founded by in 2000 by leading automobile firms of General Motors, Ford Motor, and Daimler-Chrysler, headquartered in United States.

Historical event analysis. The Table 7 in Appendix shows the historical events of covisint.com from its establishment to now. By analyzing, we find that EM functions in Covisint were constantly increased from supply chain, procurement and product development, to supply network, content personalization, application integration, and supply chain execution applications, and finally to integration framework including virtual project workplace, auctions, catalogues, quote manager, asset control, fulfilment, supplier connection, quality planner, problem solver, portal, integration, and finance service, on Covisint specialized industry operating systems with standardized message structures and services to care more of SMEs.
Covisint
Figure 1: The evolution of Covisint community EMp (source: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.covisint.com)

Figure 1 illustrates that in automobile industry sector the numbers of registered suppliers and active users increased, respectively, from 250 in 2001 to 30000 in 2005 and from 78000 in 2003 to 266000 in 2005. After then, the both numbers went flat till now. These may be explained that the automobile industry is rigid in market size. The new introduction of healthcare and public EM sectors from 2006 may indirectly imply that Covisint realized the market size problem. By speculation, if more industries are supported to increase the total market size, covisint.com will be gradually evolved from a vertical EMp to a horizontal EMp. Another interesting point is that the owner number of covisint.com increased from 4 in automobile industry to 12 including 5 in non-automobile industry. We may speculate that if the owner number of Covisint continues to increase, the feature of community EMp will gradually fade and finally Covisint will be evolved into a public EMp because more owners distributed in different industries mean no particular controls of community EMp by few influential firms. This speculation may be verified by another phenomenon, that is, the competing automobile companies as industrial alliances are also gradually joined in covisint.com slowly, limited to the large automobile companies in the world.
Anyway, in whatever changes, the total number of joining in covisint.com was increasing. Since covisint.com was obviously improving its quality and number of EM functions (F), we can infer that the overall business interoperability (I) of covisint.com was increasing, based on the formula of I = F/C, with the decreasing coordination costs (C) in covisint.com.
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