Electronic Document Interchange (EDI) over the Internet is the process of delivering your EDI documents over the Internet without going through a Value Added Network (VAN.) During the past 30 years, EDI has been the traditional method used by large and some small businesses for business to business electronic commerce communications. An EDI document typically is transferred between trading partners through a VAN provider on a transaction-cost basis.
Problem:
There are many challenges with EDI and VANs which prevent most small businesses from participating in the services. The most important are:
1) the cost of EDI implementation
2) ongoing VAN usage cost
3) maintenance costs
Less than 5 percent of all registered companies are EDI-enabled. Small businesses comprise more than 85 percent of registered companies and generate at least 50 percent of all global transactions. If these small businesses cannot participate fully in electronic transactions, the benefits to all participants in a supply chain or distribution channel are greatly diminished. Specifically, many large enterprise participants lose the benefit of millions of dollars accruing to a fully integrated value chain.
So the challenge is how to enable EDI transactions on a large scale in a cost effective manner. The opportunity to solve this challenge presents itself with the advent of the Internet.
Solution:
We understand the needs of the Small and Medium market and together with IBM, we have developed a solution that is affordable yet secure for most small businesses. There are two main components in our solution: WebSphere Partner Gateway (WPG) and WebSphere Business Integration Server Express(WBI SX). WPG is your own gateway to handle communications to your partners. WBISX takes external information, transforming it into common business objects that your internal applications can understand and integrates this information into your daily business processes. Both products are latest additions to IBM SMB software portfolio.
