OASIS Stamps Approval on ebXML CPPA

Not all analysts harbor the same optimism for ebXML, however. If ebXML’s function sounds a lot like Web services, it’s because it’s true. That is one of the reasons why ZapThink Senior Analyst Ron Schmelzer told internetnews.com many industry analysts are skeptical as to how readily ebXML will be adopted. While Sun and major players are backing it, Schmelzer said Microsoft and IBM prefer to support Web services standards, which are more general in nature, to the B2B-oriented ebXML protocol.

That said, Schmelzer said “a lot of us analysts think ebXML will find its way in the Web services arena” but how that might happen is unclear.

Read more at: Internetnews.com

Service-Oriented Process

Business processes have always been an important, if understated, asset of enterprises. The nature and methods by which a company runs its business changes on a daily basis at various different levels in the company — from high-level strategic changes to lower-level implementation details. As a result of these changes, enterprises constantly struggle to make their businesses more responsive to business changes by connecting their business requirements to their IT and human capabilities.

However, automating business processes has historically been a difficult-to-achieve goal for most enterprises due to the flexibility of their IT infrastructure. Fortunately, businesses have a solution in Service-Oriented Process: a separate abstraction layer for business process definition and execution that leverages the capabilities of Service-oriented Architectures. Service-Oriented Process provides businesses an approach to tying business requirements to the Service model represented in the SOA metamodel, thereby providing a flexible approach towards implementing architectures that promote business agility.

ZapNote: Schemantix

What has hampered explosive growth in marketplaces is that a number of value-added services beyond simple cataloging and order presentment are needed. In effect, the e-marketplace needs to offer the same features as a real-world marketplace, including complete sourcing to payment. The Schemantix Business Service Suite provides a set of interoperable turnkey applications for Billing, Payment, Logistics, Reporting, Factoring, and Request for Quotes (RFQ). These solutions are based on the Schemantix Business Service Platform that provides a customizable and localized solution for e-Marketplace participants and is tightly integrated with Commerce One and SAP marketplace systems.

E-Business and XML: Where Metadata Makes Money

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ZapNote: Attunity

Service-oriented Integration (SOI) provides an "arms-length" means for systems to simply expose their interfaces while abstracting their internal processes, thus simplifying integration. Attunity has a compelling set of solutions for facilitating the creation of SOI-enabled systems and simplifying integration challenges within organizations. Attunity seeks to expose a wide variety of data sources including custom and legacy systems as services that are used a step in automating business processes both within and external to the organization.

ZapNote: Commerce.Net

While there no doubt are more than a handful of XML-based eBusiness and e-Commerce specifications, OBI differentiates itself by focusing on the business processes and data sets required to support catalog, configurator, and other e-Procurement transactions expressed in ANSI x12, UN/EDIFACT 96A and XML. The OBI specification facilitates Internet-based transactions between trading partners, particularly with key contracted suppliers of commodity goods and services. The standard specifically targets the transactions of indirect materials, including maintenance, repair, operations (MRO) materials, and office and laboratory supplies.

ZapNote: The Open Applications Group, Inc. (OAGI)

The vision of the Open Applications Group, Inc. (OAGI) is to facilitate Business-to-Business (B2B) and Application-to-Application (A2A) integration by introducing a set of Business Object Documents (BODs) that specify integration requirements to the point that systems can be "plug and play" in the same manner that desktop systems now can support arbitrary hardware devices. OAGI initiatives play well with ebXML and RosettaNet efforts and can be used as a quick step-up towards B2B integration.

“XML: Creating a Brave New World Wide Web”

(a bit of a misquote, when taken out of context): “XML and e-business and e-commerce go hand in hand,” Schmelzer said. “Its primary point of influence is the fact that users have no control over another trading partner’s systems. Therefore, without XML and standards, there is no way to reliably conduct electronic business on a large scale. XML enables an easier and hopefully seamless exchange of business information, which is not possible without a structured language such as XML.”

Read more at: High Tech Careers