Wired science

David Perry made Chemdex, an online marketplace for lab supplies, a business-to-business darling. What are his plans for the health-care sector?

By Mark Compton

Jan 18, 2000 | "Accelerating Science" is the tag line Chemdex liberally sprinkles on its marketing materials. It's definitely got the accelerating part right.

Barely into its third year of operations, Chemdex has already established itself as the business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce leader for life sciences research. And that description doesn't even begin to cover it. The fact of the matter is that it's hard to even talk about business-to-business e-commerce without making some sort of reference to Chemdex. It was the Chemdex online exchange, after all, that arguably offered the first compelling evidence of how Internet-based solutions might be used to unify and streamline otherwise fragmented markets.

The idea of using a virtual trading floor to bring together enterprises, researchers and suppliers may have occurred to others. But it was Dave Perry who took that next step and actually made it happen.

In recent months, Chemdex has been at it again -- making moves to establish itself as a player in the mammoth health-care field. The first public evidence of that new direction came in late September with the announcement of plans to acquire Promedix.com, an infomediary trading in specialty medical equipment and supplies. Then in December things really started to pop. On the very same day it revealed plans to acquire SpecialtyMD.com, an Internet information search-and-retrieval service designed specifically for physicians, Chemdex announced its intent to join with Tenet Healthcare Corporation to form a new company focused on developing business-to-business solutions spanning the entire health-care industry. Tenet's own global purchasing organization currently handles procurements for more than 1,000 medical facilities and nearly 45,000 physicians.

And, yeah, that would qualify as getting up to speed in a hurry.

You've had yourself quite the busy little week in December.

You know, they're all busy. The amazing thing about B2B e-commerce is that the pace just continues to accelerate.

So are you saying there's now a difference between Internet time and B2B time?

That may be a little strong, but a year ago it seemed as if I had to start every customer/supplier presentation with: "Here's what the Internet is. Here's why you should care." And now, in just the last three weeks, I've probably met with 10 Fortune 100 CEOs, each of whom wanted to learn more about e-commerce. Everybody out there is trying to figure out their e-commerce strategy. And because of that, the world is moving at a pace I never would have believed just six months ago.

Is it the case that many of these CEOs don't know exactly what B2B is, but they're pretty sure they need to get some anyway?

By and large, that's true. And because we were one of the first movers in that area, we have a ton of credibility and therefore we get a ton of phone calls.

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