Leadership and strategic planning

B2B integration guide for CIOs

By SearchCIO.com Staff

SearchCIO.com

Maintaining a solid B2B integration strategy is critical for companies that want to successfully translate and communicate data with their partners and suppliers. Many companies are investing in the latest B2B integration technologies in an effort to cut costs and integrate their applications and trading partners. This guide includes a series of original articles, links and other material addressing the latest trends and technologies available to help you effectively exchange business content and information with your partners and suppliers.

This B2B integration guide is part of the SearchCIO.com CIO Briefing series, which is designed to give IT leaders strategic guidance and advice that addresses the management and decision-making aspects of timely topics. For a complete list of topics covered to date, visit the CIO Briefing section.

   Expert's Corner
   B2B
   Integration
   Supply chain management
   Collaboration
   RFID
   ERP

Expert's Corner
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It is becoming increasingly clear that having the ability to integrate business processes with external entities (whether they be customers, strategic partners or suppliers) will be a prerequisite for the future success of organizations in many sectors. Those that have robust integration functionality in place will be better able to optimize value chain operations and gain a significant advantage over their competitors that either ignore the integration imperative or do not address it effectively.

Here is a list of trends that will be the most significant in the area of B2B integration during the next two years:

Value-added networks (VANs) have morphed into flexible communication hubs. Led by industry leaders GXS Inc., Sterling Commerce Inc. and Inovis Inc., traditional VANs have evolved into communication hubs that support any type of communications exchange, including traditional batch-oriented document exchanges as well as Internet-based messaging. This gives their huge base of customers a complete range of up-to-date communication options.
Hybrid solutions will prevail in larger firms. Due to the inherent scalability of hub-based solutions, the majority of B2B communications will remain on VANs or electronic trading networks (ETNs) like Hubspan Inc., bTrade and ADX. However, the number of point-to-point connections will also grow, particularly when supporting exchanges between key trading partners.
X12 and EDIFACT will continue to be the most widely used B2B data standards. In spite of several efforts to promote the use of XML-based data standards, the vast majority of all B2B transaction activity is still based on traditional electronic data interchange (EDI) data standards, and this is unlikely to change during the next five years.
Project management will achieve a heightened level of importance due to complications related to external integration efforts. Integration projects that span value chain operations can represent a significant risk to the organizations due to the complexity of coordinating technical, business and cultural issues among the different entities.
Universal translators will become the norm. Since it is highly unlikely that all organizations in a given sector will ever adopt a single data standard for all of their electronic communications, it will become increasingly common for organizations to implement an any-to-any data and communications protocol translation. Firms utilizing a VAN or ETN can purchase this service, but those relying on a significant number of direct links will want their own capability at the firewall.

Ken Vollmer is a principal analyst in Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc.'s Application Development & Infrastructure research group, covering trends, issues and strategies related to all forms of integration, including business process management, enterprise application integration, B2B integration and EDI.

B2B
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