I wrote the article and can vouch this effectively was the business model of Commerce One. I didn't do into gory detail in the article as that wasn't the point. Basically Commerce One had a suite of products (Marketsite, Net MarketMaker etc) that were essentially business hubs with the goal of charging per business transactions and scaling recurring revenue. Commerce One also had a number of ancillary products but i would characterize them as non-core. If any ex-employee disputes the model then I'd venture a guess they didn't know what they were talking about. Commerce One obviously charged for the products themselves (and licensing/maintenance) but over time their was concern that the number of hubs would consolidate and that revenue stream would slow (after all the cost to stand up a fully blown MarketSite deployment was often in 7 figures) I worked at ForestExpress, Elemica, and Exostar as a Senior Consultant at Commerce One. Amazingly those companies are still going concerns (although none use C1 products anymore)... I imagine 80-90% of the other hubs shut down.

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