A recent worldwide survey of 500 large companies, conducted jointly by the Economist Intelligence Unit (a sister company of The Economist magazine) and Booz-Allen & Hamilton, found that more than 90% of top managers believe the Internet will transform or have a big impact on the global marketplace by 2001.

Forrester Research maintains that e-business is about to reach a threshold from which it will accelerate into "hyper-growth." Inter-company trade of goods over the Internet, Forrester forecasts, will double every year over the next five years, surging from $43 billion last year to $1.3 trillion in 2003. Undeniably, B2B integration is rapidly becoming a business requirement. To quote the June 26, 1999 issue of The Economist, "It will become progressively harder for firms that cannot or do not want to trade online to survive."

As a result of this major shift in business strategy, industries are forming online trading communities—leveraging the power of the Internet to share data and collaborative applications with business partners. Applied uses run the gamut, from automated procurement, inventory management and distribution management to order processing, integrated customer support and collaborative planning.

Of course, this sharing of information over the Internet does more than reduce the geographical, temporal and information barriers to doing business together. It compresses business cycles and creates new markets and opportunities—exactly what businesses need to gain and maintain competitive advantage.

What is B2B Integration?
At its simplest, B2B integration is the automated exchange of information between different organizations. Occurring independent of or alongside manual processes, it is most accurately described as application-to-application integration that crosses corporate boundaries (e.g. firewalls). Increasingly, this integration is being done over the Internet, rather than over proprietary Value Added Networks (VANs), and the dominant trend is towards the use of open standards such as XML and HTTP, rather than proprietary protocols that are not well suited to the Internet.

At its most effective, B2B integration improves external processes such as supply chain integration or shipping/logistics tracking by enabling rapid, cost-effective real-time links between business partners. It enables new business paradigms such as e-commerce initiatives. It reduces costs and inefficiencies by facilitating initiatives such as multi-vendor catalogs and electronic procurement—promoting comparison shopping and dramatically reducing the costs associated with traditional procurement. And it strengthens customer relationships by enabling capabilities such as real-time order management and customer service.

Key Requirements for B2B Integration via the Internet
For organizations to integrate effectively using the Internet, a software infrastructure must be deployed that meets the following requirements:

• Scalability
• Performance
• Manageability
• Extensibility
• Security
• Guaranteed message delivery across corporate firewalls
• Standards compliance
• Ability to leverage existing corporate infrastructure

The Role of eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML)
XML is a metadata language that defines a universal standard for structuring data. It is a simplified dialect of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), the International Organization for Standards (ISO) standard for defining the structure and content of electronic documents. 

XML was designed to enable business data to be served, received and processed on the Web as easily as HTML.  Though the initial focus was the exchange of structured documents over the Web, XML supports a wide variety of applications. 

Endorsed by major technology vendors, technology analysts, business consortia and standards bodies, XML is emerging as the up-and-coming "foundation" technology for B2B integration. Use of XML for e-commerce is accelerating as vertical industry groups define specific XML vocabularies, including the Open Application Group Interface Specifications (OAGIS), RosettaNet’s Partner Interchange Processes (PIPs) Framework, Microsoft’s BizTalk and Ariba’s Commerce XML (cXML).

In fact, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) adopted XML as a formal recommendation in February of 1998.  Since that time the popularity of XML has soared as Microsoft, SAP, IBM, Sun, Oracle and other industry leaders have announced support for XML.  With the current rate of adoption by the software industry, and with the increasing support of vertical industry standards bodies and large corporations, XML is certain to become an integral part of all applications and software technologies in the very near future. Why XML?

In the here and now, XML is a key enabler of both B2B electronic commerce and the open integration of applications and systems across enterprises in general. It meets the challenges of B2B integration because:

The above attributes enable organizations to use XML to build flexible and dynamic B2B applications rapidly, and with a low total cost of ownership.

For more information on XML, we recommend The XML Handbook by Charles Goldfarb (Prentice Hall Computer Books; ISBN: 0130811521).

B2B Integration and XML
Any viable B2B integration solution must address the complexity of integrating application services from any number of disparate information systems, spanning the entire length of the e-commerce continuum. Additionally, the message format must be open and flexible enough for different applications to understand and process. All of these requirements point to the use of XML in creating robust and adaptable B2B integration solutions.

One of the primary benefits of XML is that it provides a common language for structuring documents that flow between business partners in a supply chain.  Since XML documents share a common structure, the process of transforming documents into new data representations is vastly simplified. 

While XML offers far more flexibility and extensibility than either traditional messaging or EDI, XML by itself cannot deliver B2B integration. B2B integration involves much more than self-describing, extensible message formats.  Applications must first be adapted to learn to communicate using XML.  An infrastructure must also be in place to manage the integration process over time, securely and reliably route requests and translate between messages that conform to different Document Type Definitions (DTDs).  Furthermore, this infrastructure must provide robust performance, and be both scalable and manageable.

webMethods and B2B Integration
Headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia, webMethods is the leading vendor of cross-platform XML-based solutions for B2B e-commerce and integration. webMethods provides solutions to companies wishing to leverage their investments in legacy, ERP and Web-hosted applications to link their business processes with those of their key business partners. Notable customers include DHL Airways, Hewlett-Packard, Dun & Bradstreet, Cisco Systems, 3Com, Orbital Sciences Corp., VerticalNet, NEC Systems, Lexmark and Dresdner Kleinwort Benson. Strategic partnerships include Microsoft, SAP AG, Sterling Commerce, Ariba Technologies, PSDI and Intelisys Electronic Commerce.

Key Features of webMethods B2B
webMethods B2B delivers on the key requirements for B2B integration:

Scalability and Performance
The technically advanced, scalable architecture of webMethods B2B allows it to handle thousands of simultaneous business partner connections and service client requests asynchronously. webMethods B2B’s performance is optimized for multi-processor systems, and supports high-volume server-side processing of business documents.

Manageability
webMethods B2B’s administrator function automates tasks such as updating license keys, adding users, monitoring server activity and setting configuration options for individual services. The Server Administrator also provides a view with sliding window statistics on all B2B services and enables configuration for SNMP based notification, should any individual B2B services fail. In addition, components can be grouped together in "packages," and automatically replicated to other servers via the Server Administrator.

Extensibility
Highly extensible, webMethods B2B allows enterprise systems to be integrated once, and functionality to be exposed as either documents or services (real-time interfaces), as part of a RosettaNet PIP, an OBI transaction, an EDI document, a CBL document, a cXML document, an arbitrary XML message, a thin client library (C/C++, Java, Visual Basic) or via browser-based applications. For instance, a SAP Financials application can "see" a Baan Manufacturing application as a native SAP resource, even when the two applications are separated by corporate firewalls.

Guaranteed Message Delivery Across Firewalls
If ubiquity is generally recognized as the Internet’s strength, the reliability of the Internet is perceived as the remaining issue in its use as a B2B medium. Additionally, the firewalls that organizations erect for security purposes represent a significant barrier for B2B information exchange.

Unlike other solutions, webMethods B2B effectively addresses issues of reliability by guaranteeing that messages are delivered once and only once. And because webMethods B2B uses the standard Internet protocol HTTP, operation through firewalls is not a problem.

Standards Support and Compliance
At the forefront of the XML community, webMethods supports all open Internet standards, including the OAGIS, RosettaNet’s PIPs Framework, Microsoft’s Biztalk and Ariba’s Commerce XML (cXML).

webMethods participates actively in standards groups including the W3C, the OAG, the Supply Chain Council, the Information & Content Exchange (ICE) Advisory Council, RosettaNet and Commerce Net. A member of W3C’s XSL and RDF working groups, webMethods co-authored XQL (an XML Query Language) with Microsoft and Texcel in 1998.  

The webMethods B2B product suite broadly supports XML, using XML for virtually all types of applications. These include:

In addition, webMethods works closely with leading vendors on XML efforts that include Microsoft’s BizTalk, SAP’s XML BAPIs and IDOCs, Sun’s Java API for XML Parsing and Ariba’s cXML.  All of these technologies and initiatives are supported natively by webMethods B2B.

Security
webMethods B2B provides end-to-end security through widely acclaimed, standard internet protocols such as HTTPS, SSL encryption and X.509 digital certificates for security and authentication.

Ability to Leverage Existing Corporate Infrastructure
By taking advantage of standard Internet technologies and by supporting quick, cost-effective integration with existing systems such as EDI, ERP, e-commerce, databases, middleware and other operational systems, webMethods B2B delivers on the promise of non-intrusive integration. Impact on IT infrastructures is minimized which, in turn, minimizes risk, reduces time to implementation and lowers the barriers to B2B integration—both political and technological.

Summary
The goals of B2B integration are to increase the efficiencies of distributed communications across organizations while decreasing the cost of such communications. By more closely coordinating activities between business partners, businesses can realize dramatic productivity gains. EDI has achieved limited success in this regard. B2B integration moves beyond the limited transaction sets supported by EDI to automate all data flows across a supply chain.