B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

38 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
2.4.3. System heterogeneity
B2Bi poses a double pronged problem — internal systems heterogeneity
and external systems heterogeneity. A global 2000 company has
thousands of employees and several hundred business partners. Its IT
infrastructure is comprised of multiple applications (commercial and
in-house), running on several different operating systems, networks and
hardware. This is a problem compounded by the fact that each partner
(supplier, distributor and customer) has a different IT infrastructure.
The technologies to integrate such a heterogeneous (in terms of
software, hardware, operating systems and programming environments)
and distributed system are very complex and difficult to put in place.
As the number of companies participating in the B2Bi process grows,
the complexity of the integration challenges increases exponentially.
2.4.4. Data security
Companies struggle to find a complete B2Bi solution that would link
internal systems with partners' systems quickly, bringing guaranteed
delivery, secure communications and transaction traceability over the
Internet.
B2B transactions involve high value, sensitive corporate data and
exposure of internal back-end systems. There is a lot at stake, hence the
issue of security is extremely important.
2.4.5. Transaction integrity
Transaction integrity is defined as the degree to which a transaction
flowing through a network reaches its intended destination without
impairment of its function, content or meaning.
To leverage maximum value from B2Bi, it is critical to ensure that
each business process between applications completed successfully —
from the point where the transaction is initiated all the way through to
every application where the information is being used. If the transaction
fails at any point, the whole transaction has to be aborted. Since B2B
applications are distributed, it is a major challenge to maintain
transactional integrity.