Language key to e-commerce
By GARTH MONTGOMERY
21jul98
BUSINESS-to-business electronic commerce is suffering poor uptake because enabling technologies are immature and difficult to integrate, according to a new report.
The report, Opening The Market, by international researcher Ovum, comes after a survey of leading e-commerce users during April and May.
But the report says the next generation of e-commerce solutions will fuse today's methods of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), which focus on process efficiency between supply chain partners, with searchable information via a Web interface using eXtensible Markup Language (XML).
"There has been a shift in the way e-commerce is being sold to business," Ovum analyst and report co-author Beth Barling said.
"Today's focus is on competitive differentiation of products and services, as the Web is treated like a walk-up information and interactive resource.
"Tomorrow's business-to-business e-commerce adopters are lured by the Internet's potential to radically change industry structure as well as the interaction between buyers, sellers and process intermediaries."
Ovum defines business-to-business e-commerce in terms of three enablers: communications, applications and services.
The limitations of Internet instability, plus the various standards for EDI, must be overcome before substantial uptake of business-to-business e-commerce is possible, Ms Barling said.
EDI allows diverse computer systems, whether or not part of the same company, to communicate and exchange data in a standardised form without a high degree of human intervention.
"Concerns about the Internet range from quality of service - robustness, reliability, security - to the Web's poor directory services, which makes it hard to find things, and poor application integration capabilities," Ms Barling said.
Today's e-commerce products that focus on selling things on the Web will evolve into products tailored to purchasing and procurement of goods and services.
Although XML has only recently been endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium, it has already attracted considerable interest.
XML is a meta-language that handles document markup. It is concerned with the structure of data, providing a common description syntax that enables presentation of data in multiple formats.
XML/EDI is a proposal for a common syntax for EDI messages that makes use of the XML standard for Web-based publishing.
"XML/EDI points the way to the next generation of integrated supply chain applications," Ms Barling said.
"The most likely early implementations of XML/EDI will involve the presentation of EDI messages to users via a browser interface." Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0 browser already supports XML. Netscape has also pledged support for XML in version 5.0 of its Communicator browser, scheduled for release towards the end of 1998.
The ability to add process logic to XML documents is the key. This feature currently exists only at conceptual level.
The plan is to use Interchange Transformation Templates (ITTemplates), facilitated by Java-or-ActiveX-based agent components.
These templates will contain a type of Processing Control Language (PCL) that will enable data contained within an XML document to be associated with other processes, external applications and databases.
"The future of EDI will be influenced by how quickly and easily it can overcome the traditional obstacles to adoption," Ms Barling said.
"There are several competing directions established from those changes."
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