Content area
Full Text
With the growth of the Internet, business-to-- business procurement and other processes are being moved to the World Wide Web, for increased efficiency and reach. Procurement systems from different vendors use various protocols, and additional protocols are being defined by several industry consortia. As a consequence, suppliers are faced with the difficult task of supporting a large number of protocols in order to interoperate with various procurement systems and private marketplaces. In this paper, we outline the connectivity requirements for suppliers and private marketplaces, and we describe how suppliers and marketplaces based on IBM's WebSphere Commerce Business Edition and WebSphere Commerce Suite, Marketplace Edition can interoperate with diverse procurement systems and electronic marketplaces. We first describe simple connectivity based on punchout processes for fixed and contract-based pricing. We then describe how asynchronous processes, such as requests for quote, auctions, and exchanges can be distributed for interoperability across suppliers and marketplaces. Finally, we describe B2B/M2M Protocol Exchange, a prototype we have implemented that maps between different, but analogous, protocols used in procurement systems, and thus alleviates some of the interoperability difficulties.
With the rapid growth of the Internet, organizations are increasingly using the Web to conduct business with greater speed, reach, and efficiency. This transformation is especially prevalent in business-to-business (B2B) commerce and trade. Many of the Fortune 500 companies have adopted e-procurement systems such as Ariba, Commerce One, and mySAP. Many others participate as buyers in e-marketplaces such as Commerce One MarketSet, Ariba Hosted Market Place, and IBM's WebSphere* Commerce Suite, Marketplace Edition (WCS MPE, or MPE for short), among others.
Figure 1 illustrates the environment for B2B procurement on the Web. B2B buyers have diverse procurement systems, such as those offered by Ariba, Commerce One, and SAP, among others. Each of these procurement systems uses different B2B protocols for interaction with seller systems. Many of these protocols are proprietary and specific to the procurement system. For example, as illustrated in Figure 1, Ariba uses the punchout process between the Ariba Order Request Management System (ORMS) and seller systems using their "Commerce XML" (cXML, or Commerce Extensible Markup Language) specification for the messages1; Commerce One uses xCBL2 as the format of messages; mySAP uses the "Open Catalog Interface" (OCI) (for a process similar...