B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) 123
centralized within an organization, which tends to be a more efficient
framework for integration. Conversely, B2Bi models have to support
joint development activities and technology level agreements among
independent organizations, a much more challenging task.
In many B2B marketplaces today, companies are relying on proprietary
EAI middleware to facilitate B2B communication. Many of these
middleware solutions are mature, stable and battle-tested, providing an
adequate framework for transacting over the Internet. This stability
usually comes at the expense of accessibility, openness and scalability.
Currently, B2Bi implementation is subjected to frequent changes as
the industry standards change or the business processes of trading
partners change. The eventual acceptance of evolving B2B protocols
and standards such as SOAP/XML, UDDI, XMLT will promise to
provide companies with a common, standardized framework for
conducting B2B transactions, eliminating the need for proprietary
software or constant rework. Once these standards become widely
accepted in the marketplace, EAI will be relegated to middleware
solutions such as messaging and distributed objects while B2Bi will be
reduced to protocol-based communication, much like TCP/IP or HTTP
is today.
The other major area of divergence is security. With EAI, companies
do not have to worry about encryption, firewall implementations, crossorganization
distributed applications, or partner management, all of
which pose difficult challenges in B2Bi. In addition, B2Bi implementation
is inherently more complex from a global perspective, as it has to deal
with different international laws regarding the use and export of
cryptographic technology.
4.10. Conclusion
Integration of enterprise applications is a key element of B2Bi strategy.
EAI can truly make a company's B2Bi implementation a success or a
failure. By integrating and streamlining business processes and the
applications supporting them, EAI empowers enterprises to achieve
higher operational efficiency, increased revenues and better customer
service.