Chapter 2: Types of E-Commerce Technology

In addition to a general discussion of e-commerce technology, this chapter also covers various business-to-business connectivity protocols between procurement systems, private marketplaces, and suppliers. The chapter describes how WCBE-based suppliers and private marketplaces can connect to diverse procurement systems, other suppliers, and external private marketplaces. Specifically, the chapter shows 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 describes 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 outlines the types of trading mechanisms that can be supported by existing punchout protocols and the asynchronous trading mechanisms, such as request for quotations (RFQs), that require extensions to the punchout mechanisms. The chapter also describes B2B/M2M Protocol Exchange, a tool that IBM has implemented that can map between various protocols used by different procurement systems. Although this chapter focuses on the external partner business-to-business (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.