6.3 Background

Business-to-Business integration (B2Bi) has primarily involved many host-to-host interfaces, personalized commerce services, and business process collaboration. As we have discussed in earlier chapters, private labeling has become more popular to leverage the infrastructure of the service provider for low-cost B2Bi. Time-to-market and personalized service information are key business drivers. With increasing organizational restructuring, consolidation, and mergers, many corporations are seriously looking into B2Bi technology options that can deliver results speedily.

The ability to provide personalized service information and Single Sign-on to private labeling clients is essential. This enables the clients to enjoy the same business functionality provided by the private labeling Service Provider, while keeping their own branding and integrating with their existing back-office systems. It is a key service differentiation factor.

Technology is changing frequently. It would be good risk mitigation for architects and developers to adopt a mature technology and adhere to a technology standard to integrate and interoperate with other business partners . Today, the integration technology options for many architects and developers include deploying proprietary interfaces, adapting an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) product as their integration infrastructure, using a specific Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) product, and adopting Web Services technology for integration. These options are like a spectrum with two polarity ends ”proprietary and open technology.

Table 6-1 outlines a high-level comparison of these integration technology options:

Table 6-1. Different B2Bi Integration Technology Options

	Pros	Cons	Risks
Proprietary interfaces	Proprietary interfaces are highly customized to meet local business and technology requirements. Interfaces and message formats can be standardized across the enterprise without depending on external parties.	They are not easily reusable and extended for other similar requirements. They may require complex changes or re-engineering in order to integrate and interoperate with external business partners.	These interfaces may work like a black box, and thus the technology has high maintenance issues.
ERP	Companies that have deployed an ERP system can leverage the ERP infrastructure to integrate with their front-end systems. ERP systems usually have J2EE and XML connectors and interfaces that can communicate with other systems.	Only newer versions of ERP systems support J2EE and XML connectors. It may be very complicated and expensive to develop a new connector for the ERP system. The required ERP integration expertise is scarce .	There is a risk of vendor lock-in with the ERP infrastructure. The scalability and extensibility of the integration architecture is impacted by the legacy architecture of the ERP system. In some cases, any change is dependent on the availability and capability of the ERP system.
EAI	EAI adapters (connectors) can be customized to accommodate different requirements of each system. Complex business process and workflow requirements can be integrated using Message-Oriented Middleware (MOM) and Integration Manager. This allows more flexibility and extensibility.	EAI is usually expensive to implement. Workflow changes may require business process re-engineering, which may complicate the implementation. Different EAI products are not interoperable.	Adopting a specific middleware to implement EAI may lock in with a specific vendor architecture and technology. It is fairly painful to switch to another vendor technology.
Web Services	Web Services technology has emerged as an Open Standard technology option for B2Bi. It is a light-weight technology option and can be used without EAI. Java Web Services technology collaborates with and complements J2EE-based EAI to provide B2Bi.	WSDL-UDDI-SOAP Web Services does not support business process and workflow integration. (ebXML Web Services technology does though through BPSS, the Business Process Spec Schema)	The business process and workflow integration capability of WSDL-UDDI-SOAP technology is still evolving. ebXML technology offers a more sophisticated Web Services alternative to address the B2Bi requirements.