Online commerce software vendor Intershop, which provide the technology behind Xtra's Business Builder, has appointed former Compaq Computer CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer to its Supervisory Board.
Intershop expects to shortly elect Pfeiffer, the former chairman and chief executive officer of Compaq, as chairman of the company's Supervisory Board, said Heiner Schaumann, a spokesman at the company's headquarters in Jena, Germany. In a German corporation, the Supervisory Board plays a similar function to the Board of Directors in a US company.
Pfeiffer is also taking a small undisclosed equity stake in Intershop.
Ousted as head of Compaq in April, Pfeiffer serves on a number of company boards, including that of the German online auction house Ricardo.de AG.
Pfeiffer will also make an appearance at Intershop's first developer and user conference in New York next week, Schaumann said, where Intershop will unveil new software for business-to-business commerce over the Web.
Schaumann declined to give more details on the product before it is introduced, but said it is based on a different technology than Intershop's core product, called Intershop 4. It is based on Java and XML (extensible markup language), a language increasingly being adopted for applications over the Web. The new product has been under development for two years at Intershop, he said.
The new product will be launched in the US next week, with a German-language version to follow later, he added.
Intershop, with double headquarters in Jena, Germany, and San Francisco, can be reached at http://www.intershop.com/, or at http://www.intershop.de/.