Business-to-business communications

Let’s imagine for a moment that you own a business. Let’s consider the possible impact on your business mode if you could sustain an automated relationship (possibly at all levels) with your customers and partners? What aspects of your business could be streamlined? Would there be benefits internally in your organization? What would happen if your business systems could understand the content of your data stores without re-engineering your existing data systems?

That is the effect XML is going to have on businesses. Data will move seamlessly based on content, intelligent business systems will be far more useful than ever before and businesses will be able to work automatically with customers and partners with minimum effort.

Are you wondering why these benefits have not been delivered before? After all, didn’t we hear the same promises from the EDI, SGML and recently the Internet salespeople? Yes, but businesses didn’t count on the overhead of building EDI systems. SGML? That was too complex to use. The Internet/HTML combination is too simple and not flexible enough.

The common failure in all the above architectures is that the output of current computer systems can only be understood by other systems that have been developed to understand the data. In other words, unless Microsoft Excel had been programmed to understand a Microsoft Access database, it would not be able to work with the Microsoft Access database. Another simple example is, if your customer or partner upgrades their software, it could lose synchronization with your systems and communications and data exchange could cease.

But XML changes this, because with XML, systems need never know where the data is coming from or what version the software is - and so on. XML is used to structure and define the content of your data and used correctly; XML (or more specifically an XML file called a schema) will enable intelligent and useful data exchange between two pieces of software, which have not been programmed to understand each other.

That’s why we are beginning to see a massive boom in electronic data transfer between eCommerce systems and business-to-business solutions.