Summary

The best way to encourage future growth of the global information economy is to learn from the past. Centers of e-commerce technology activity continue to emerge around the world: the original Silicon Valley in California, joined by Silicon Alley in New York City, Silicon Forest in Seattle, or even Silicon Dominion in the State of Virginia, is mirrored by the emergence of Silicon Glen in Scotland and Silicon Plain in Finland. Other concentrations of expertise, equipment, and infrastructure include the Research Triangle in North Carolina, the Route 128 Corridor in Massachusetts, the Intelligent Island in Singapore, and the Multimedia Super Corridor in Malaysia.

Some of these centers developed naturally; others were created and fostered by governments that provided financing, tax relief (for imported equipment or income earned), open immigration for “knowledge workers,” and telecommunications infrastructure. Each of these centers embraced the fact that collecting industry experience and expertise in a specific area promotes “critical mass” and synergies, thus fostering faster e-commerce technological development in that region’s economy.

The same can hold true with regard to users. The world is comprised of over six billion people, yet there are only 900 million telephone lines in existence. Many of the world’s citizens have never made a telephone call, let alone used the Internet. How can this be changed?

The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) offers one approach to this problem. UNESCO suggests the establishment of public access communication and information services, known as Telecentres. These centers are being developed across Africa, either as standalone facilities or by adding PCs to schools, libraries, police stations, and clinics.

Private Telecentres and telekiosks have been established in Ghana, Kenya, and Senegal, among other countries. Built on the principle that sharing the expense of equipment, skills development, and access among a large group helps to cut costs and make information services viable in remote areas, UNESCO has helped foster these technology hubs across the continent of Africa. It has even developed a “Community Telecentre Cookbook for Africa,” a how-to guide on establishing and operating Telecentres.

In addition to a general discussion of e-commerce technology, this chapter also covered various business-to-business connectivity protocols between procurement systems, private marketplaces, and suppliers. The chapter described how WCBE-based suppliers and private marketplaces can connect to diverse procurement systems, other suppliers, and external private marketplaces. Specifically, the chapter showed how WCBE-based suppliers and WCS MPE-based marketplaces can connect to buyers at procurement systems that use punchout, such as Ariba, Commerce One, and mySAP. The chapter then described how a WCS MPE-based supplier or private marketplace could originate a punchout process in order to connect to either an external supplier or another private marketplace.

Next, the chapter outlined the types of trading mechanisms that can be supported by existing punchout protocols and the asynchronous trading mechanisms, such as RFQs, which require extensions to the punchout mechanisms. Although these mechanisms can be used across WCS MPE-based suppliers and private marketplaces, such mechanisms need to be standardized in order to enable them to connect to suppliers and marketplaces provided by other vendors.

The chapter also described B2B/M2M Protocol Exchange, a tool that IBM has implemented that can map between various protocols used by different procurement systems. It allows a supplier using one protocol to connect to a procurement system or private marketplace that uses a different protocol.

Finally, the WCBE-based Commerce Integrator, with support for B2B procurement protocols as described earlier in the chapter, has been used to connect ibm.com, as a supplier, to enterprises using diverse procurement systems and to private marketplaces. Although this chapter focused on the external partner B2B protocols, a large part of the integration effort for suppliers is the tie-in to internal processes, such as the processes to handle purchase orders. Other complementary products, such as IBM’s WebSphere MQ and WebSphere Business Integrator, are key to completing the picture for end-to-end integration.