Product Line or Service

Highway Interchange is a B2G/B2B Marketplace for the Highway construction, maintenance, and operations industry. This marketplace serves those organizations involved in the construction, maintenance and operations of all roads and bridges in the United States. Products and Services in these areas will include:

• Informational Products/Services: Industry news, online training courses, document libraries including regulations that affect the industry, directories, video and audio broadcast archives.
• Collaboration/Workflow products and services: Highway Project management functions, procurement and bidding tools, discussion boards, online broadcast center, and estimation/calculation tools for practitioners.
• E-Commerce: Auctions, multi-vendor online catalogs, RFPs/RFQs, online customer support centers, virtual trade shows.

Stage of Development

Highway Interchange.com entered a soft launch period in March 2000. The E-Business Services Unit has generated $10M dollars of profitable revenue over the last five years from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). 1999 revenue was $3.8M. The FHWA is the most significant player in the space and finances approximately $30B each year in highway spending. The company currently has 30 full-time employees that have delivered award-winning and nationally recognized e-Business and Net Marketplace solutions to this industry. 

Technology/Proprietary Rights

Our business model emphasizes an elegant integration of internet-based tools for the entire purchasing process, collaboration, web-casting, and personalized content management rather than proprietary technology that can be licensed or used for competitive advantage. Our workflow models and business rules for integrating into the back office applications of our marketplace participants will be proprietary and embedded in our solution.

Market Opportunities

The expenditures to design, build, manage, and maintain our nation’s 3.9 million miles of roads and bridges was $94 Billion in 1997 according to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association. The projections for 1999 are $102 Billion and these expenditures are expected to grow to $122 Billion in 2003.=

Our marketplace will allow members of the industry to transact business throughout all phases of the building, maintenance and operations of our nation’s surface transportation infrastructure. This infrastructure is valued at over $1.75 trillion by the US Department of Commerce.

Marketing/Sales and Distribution

Our marketing strategy will be to leverage our FHWA and State DOT relationships to enter into agreements with each state, any one of which could create more liquidity than has been achieved by almost any existing net market in any industry. In addition to traditional marketing approaches, we will sponsor a series of seminars that we will deliver nationally entitled e-business for the highway industry that showcases the Highway Interchange marketplace and addresses all aspects of e-business.

Manufacturing

Our exchange facilitates electronic commerce and information exchange. We will not take possession of the products and services that move through our exchange nor will we manufacture goods.

Competition

Several organizations are providing segmented, partial solutions for highway industry information on the Internet. These are principally the trade associations, directory firms, and publishers of industry information. To date, none are aiming toward a true net marketplace exchange with all of the workflow tools to achieve efficiency at each stage of the buying process.

In addition, there are marketplaces that are broader in scope and have not served the highway industry well (buzzsaw.com, bidcom.com, buildnet.com, publicworks.com, etc.). These include general construction marketplaces, public works portals, and transportation portals. These competitors, by staying broad, have not yet gained traction in the highway industry, but they are to be monitored closely. Strategic alliances or mergers are always to be considered in this quick-changing environment.

In the near term, we will continue to compete with traditional media and brick and mortar supply chains for advertising, marketing, and supply chain distribution dollars. Over time, the migration of business users to the Internet as their principal means of sourcing products and doing business will focus our competition to only pure Internet alternatives to Highway Interchange.