The ETO System was developed by the United Nations Trade Point Development Centre, UNTPDC, which is a joint subsidiary support organization of the Special Programme on Trade Efficiency under UN CTAD responsibility.

The Trade Efficiency Iniciative responds to three pressing problems:

• First, an urgent need to increase the international awareness of the possibilities of modern Information Technologies to trade problems;

• Second, to enable effective application of those Information Technologies to trade and;

• Third, to promote the use of models capable of reducing procedural cost in international trade. The overall concept of the UNTPDC is an enhanced technological support centre providing state-of-the-art technical and conceptual support to the GTPNet.

The ETO System provides subscribers around the world with a single point of contact for their trade, investment and business opportunities using an international standard structured and using EDI-UN-EDIFACT messages, as well as, their international communication requirements. This is achieved through the connection to the Global Trade Point Network, GTPNet.

The ETO System presently connects 70 Trade Points and 900 trade related bodies in 35 developed countries, 26 developing countries and 10 LDC's. The ETO System currently generates more than 69,000 recor ds monthly, resulting in nearly 7 GB of EDI-UN-EDIFACT messages structured Information for Trade every month.

The increasing needs to quickly transmit and manage accurate Information for Trade around the world is of utmost importance for trade efficiency in today's competitive economies. The rapid changes arising from the progressive removal of trade barrie rs in many countries and the opportunities offered by new communication technologies are changing the economic scenario in the world. As a result, there is a continuous supply of new products, services, and industrial processes. Companie s must deal with shorter life cycles and faster obsolescence, decreasing unit costs, increasing investments, higher risks, new pricing criteria, and new fields of competition.

The organization of companies and production processes are changing rapidly, consequently, there arises a need for entirely new commercial services, a service that collect, process and disseminate fast and accurate commercial informati on electronically using electronic commerce technologies.

Due to high cost of advanced IT-systems and telecommunications, such services were only a few years ago inconceivable for smaller companies. The ETO System provides this assistance on in international scale, offering the same be nefits that were previously only enjoyed by large organizations.

The ETO System enables Trade Points and trade related bodies to:

• Exchange Information for Trade in standardized form on a global basis using EDI-UN-EDIFACT messages, this message is available for the distribution of ETOs (trading opportunities, offers, pr oduct information and price lists) between different Trade Points. Presentation of product information capable for very specific and complicated descriptions.

• Standardize the National Standard Classifications in use at national level with International Classifications (HS, ITC, BTU), and Services classification.

• Automatic matching of buyers/sellers inquires against buyers/sellers offers: This facility will enable ETO users to track the number of occasions which buyer/sellers inquires are matched with a particular exporter / impo rter. It will also be possible to use this facility, when surveying buyers/sellers to record the successful matches and their business transactions originated by ETO. This facility also includes a statistical summary for monitoring t he matches.

• Client-server software technology, providing the user with an integrated solution using the Internet WW1 and Gopher as major data depository and advance indexing technology to search and query for data among ETO users worldwide.

• Enable effective communication via electronic mail, Gopher and WW1 using telecommunication services at national level available in the countries with Trade Points.

• Connect existing national Trade Information Services in the world using the ETO gateway facilities available on the UNTPDC world wide web at http://www.unicc.org/untpdc/welcome.html.

• Improve data presentation available on the ETO-EDI message to include pictures, sound , video and a full range of advance multimedia technologies available on the ETO Visual system on the WWW.

• Special gateway agreements with major network providers to interconnect their communities to the ETO community such as the ETO*link service operated by General Electric Information Services GEIS.