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What a difference a year makes.
The sober-minded managers from the Fortune 1000 companies that last year flocked to electronic data interchange conferences hardly mentioned the Internet without shaking their heads in disapproval.
This month, the Internet was the designated conference theme at two major EDI shows - the Data Interchange Standards Association meeting in New Orleans and the Corporate EFT/Financial EDI Conference here.
EDI managers do not seem ready to bolt en masse from the EDI value-added networks (VAN) where they pay by the byte to transmit their EDI data to trading partners. But the lure of the Internet, with its flat-rate price, common network standards, and worldwide links to electronic mail and the Web, is becoming irresistible to many, in spite of qualms about hackers and the Internet's lack of end-to-end network management.
"Ten years...