B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

122 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
The bottom line is that the marketplace is converging and merging at
a rapid pace as software vendors look to provide a complete e-business
solution. Literally, there are thousands of niche e-business, B2B, EAI,
or enterprise software firms, each one providing a value-added service.
Some of these firms will emerge as winners and survive in their own
right. Others will be gobbled up by the 'big-boys' such as Microsoft
and IBM, as these companies continue to flex their muscles by leveraging
their current market penetration and domination. The remainder will
probably atrophy and disappear.
SCIQUEST GOES THROUGH EAI BEFORE
IMPLEMENTING B2Bi
SciQuest, a scientific products e-marketplace, maintains more than
1.2 million products from more than 700 suppliers in its virtual
catalog. When a customer places an order, SciQuest has to pass that
information along to anywhere from two to thousands of different
suppliers. SciQuest also has to link electronically to other partners,
such as shippers FedEx and UPS. To have a truly automated order
management process, they have to support a diverse range of systems
of their suppliers, who have infrastructure as basic as e-mail and a
Web browser to fairly sophisticated ERP and high-end EDI systems.
SciQuest had to get its internal act together before its systems
could effectively communicate with the outside world. As a part of
EAI, the company had to link its Siebel CRM system and Solomon
financial software to the DB2 database where up-to-date information
about all suppliers' products is stored. That back-office infrastructure
was then to be linked to the IBM Net.commerce Web catalog that
lets its customers shop and buy from SciQuest online.
Source: Condensed from EAI goes B2B, InternetWeek
4.9. Divergence of EAI and B2Bi
As B2B protocols and specifications mature, a schism will eventually
develop between the roles of EAI and B2Bi. EAI models are typically