The Semantics of Integration between Enterprises

Integrating outside the boundaries of your enterprise is completely different. This is the world of B2B and SCM. You do not have the luxury of defining the most elegant model and integrating to that. You have a host of different consortia and standards to deal with, as well as specific point-to-point interfaces.

A few prominent standards cross many industries and should be the first consideration for these efforts:

• ebXML^[89]—sponsored by the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS); has developed open standards for intercompany commerce

• xCBL^[90]—originally developed and sponsored by CommerceOne, now an open standard for promoting eMarketplaces

• cXML14^[91]—originally developed and sponsored by Ariba, now an open standard primarily focused on eProcurement

These are some of the key standards for B2B across all industries. However, you may find that you need to deal with vertical industry particulars. You may want to use your industry's consortia-led XML standard and start building onto it, but you may not be doing most of your external transactions within your own industry. Say you build injection-molded plastic parts, and your biggest customers are automotive manufacturers. You have a lot of transactions with people in the automotive supply chain. You also have transactions with customers in other vertical chains, perhaps consumer electronics and office furniture. You make purchases from the chemical industry, and may deal with a human resources XML consortium for recruiting. Assuming you can sort through these and determine which are more important and less important, you next have a topology issue to resolve.

The principle topology questions are as follows:

• Do I want to integrate directly with some of my key partners?

• Is there a "market maker" who fulfills the role of an intermediary for an industry?

• Do I want to allow many partners to integrate to me?

These are strategic questions with semantic overtones. Strategically, and historically, if you were a significant trading partner with another company, you would want to invest in some sort of point-to-point interface with that company. The interface represents a capital investment in your relationship and helps raise a barrier to potential competitors. You might prefer to leave the semantics of the interface ambiguous and change it over time, which again keeps out competitors.

If a particular partner or class of partners does not represent a large part of your business, you may want to participate with a market maker. A market maker fulfills a role in a market where there are many buyers and many sellers, and it would be cost prohibitive for each of them to find and negotiate with each other (it's the combinatorial explosion problem again); instead, each deals with the market maker. For example, eScout has created a marketplace for procurement, primarily of "indirect" items, and Neoforma and GHX have created marketplaces for health care supplies.

If you have a product or service that you believe many other partners (or consumers) would want to integrate to, you may want to invest in making this as easy as possible. In the past this meant allowing email or bulletin boards of files, but now it means an easy-to-use Web site (business to consumer) or a Web Services interface to your applications. We'll discuss the Web Services angle more in Chapter 13. It should be noted that many firms have built an on-line presence only to realize that their on-line presence wasn't integrated with their delivery systems, turning the external integration problem into an internal integration problem.

If you find yourself in the first scenario (integrating with key partners), the semantics of the defined interfaces will be of great interest, and your primary approach will be as described in Chapter 9.

In any of the scenarios, an important issue to address is how to reduce the number of internal applications that are dealing with outsiders. If you deal with 50 key partners, three marketplaces, and thousands of on-line customers, your systems development effort will gridlock if you allow all of your 68 applications to access any or all of these outsiders. To manage the complexity, run your internal systems through their semantic intermediary and then to the outside world through a common gateway.

^[89]See http://www.ebxml.org/ for further information.

^[90]See http://www.xcbl.org/ for further information.

^[91]See http://www.cxml.org/ for further information.