A new E-commerce platform has been launched with the help of a Bermuda company which will assist wholesale distributors of IT products to operate throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

A Florida company, Klatu Inc., (www.klatu.net) has teamed up with Bermuda-based First Atlantic Commerce Ltd. and technology partner CNET Channel to launch a Business-to-Business (B2B) E-commerce platform.

Two of the largest IT distributors in the world, Tech Data and Ingram Micro Inc., have signed up for the new Internet service and will use it as their sole E-commerce platform for their customers.

Tech Data's products include hardware such as Apple, Dell and HP Compaq and last year the company had worldwide sales of $15.7 billion, while Ingram Micro Inc. is another wholesale distributor with a range of 280,000 products from 1,700 IT manufacturers.

These two companies have a presence in the Latin America and Caribbean region, but their business strategy is to use local retailers in individual countries to sell the computer equipment.

The applications for the Klatu E-commerce platform at a local level is demonstrated by the websites of local computer retailers, Gateway (www.gateway.bm) and Computer City (www.computercity.bm).

These two companies have used the Klatu platform to build "E-stores" which have pictures of all the products and allow price estimates for Bermuda purchases. Sites built using the Klatu platform employ online payment processing which is provided by First Atlantic Commerce.

"It puts all the info about the Tech Data and Ingram Micro Inc. products on one spot," explained Mark Austin of Bermuda's Gateway Systems Limited. He said that Gateway have been using the new Klatu Inc. platform for about a month.

According to Mr. Austin, the new platform could lead to growth opportunities for Gateway. "Basically it allows our customers to access our pricing more easily. People don't have to phone in for quotes all the time, they can just go online."

There is still room for improvement, however: "The pricing does not include shipping, freight or duty at the moment and we may add that in the future."

In the future, Mr. Austin also hopes that when customers enter a corporate account number on the Gateway site, the site will bring up the corporate profile and relevant information about their orders and the systems they already use.

According to Andrea Wilson, chief executive officer at First Atlantic Commerce, the deal breaks a long period of non-activity in the E-commerce arena with very few recent launches of either B2C or B2B dot.coms specifically for the Caribbean region. At the moment, the platform is solely for the technology sector, but in the future, they may reach out to other industry suppliers.

"Until recently, the Caribbean based computer retailers were leveraging US-based ecommerce platforms to drive their business which limited their ability to price and settle card-based payments in their own domestic currency,'' Ms Wilson said.

"The new Klatu E-commerce solution allows the retailer to price in their domestic currency as well as in a multitude of international currencies - a comprehensive solution that hasn't been available to this region until now."

Ms Wilson added: "Consumers in the Latin American Caribbean region can now visit their local reseller's e-store and order from the inventories of that reseller's major suppliers.

"This is what global E-commerce is all about."