b2b angleI confess, I never really understood the implications of B2B or how it works. I clipped this from the national post yesterday, and thought it might make for some good reading. The b2b players look to be in the middle of a shake up, a servival of the fittest. This might shed some light on how Conac may fit into the frey in a short time --
Microsoft, IBM lead push for B2B standard
XML-based: Proposed registries would streamline buying
and selling
John Markoff
The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO - Seeking to promote the rapid development of
electronic commerce between businesses, International Business
Machines Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Ariba Inc. are expected to announce
a proposal today to create a huge set of online registries of products
and services to help automate business transactions.
Twenty-nine companies, including American Express Co., Commerce One
Inc., Compaq Computer Corp., Merrill Lynch & Co. and Sun Microsystems
Inc., will initially endorse the proposal, to be named the Universal
Description, Discovery and Integration project, or UDDI. The backers
said they planned to turn the idea over eventually to one of several
Internet standards bodies to make it a broadly backed initiative. "We
are intent on making the Web an easier way to handle
business-to-business transactions," said Marie Weik, IBM's director of
electronic markets infrastructure.
The initiative comes at a time when companies have begun to grapple
with the intricacies of electronic commerce, hoping to achieve the
original promise of a new Internet publishing standard known as
Extensible Markup Language, or XML.
Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, led to the current World Wide
Web as a vast publishing medium. Many hope XML will permit direct
computer-to-computer transactions in the next generation of the Web.
Until recently, the UDDI project was a closely held secret among the
three companies. While IBM and Microsoft are dominant players in
Internet commerce, Ariba is a smaller electronic commerce firm, based
in Mountain View, Calif.
Although the initiative is being portrayed as an effort to create an
"open" standard, the UDDI project offers some insight into the bruising
behind-the-scenes competition in the world of Internet standards as
companies seek proprietary advantage for new technologies.
Several executives at competing electronic commerce companies said
the UDDI standard initiative parallels but ignores an earlier effort led by
Commercenet, a competing Silicon Valley electronic commerce initiative.
Known as the eCo Framework Project, that system also focused on
creating public electronic registries and automated electronic commerce.
But the Commercenet effort has lost momentum and Microsoft has
moved quickly to take over the effort to set standards for electronic
commerce.
Making analogies to telephone directory yellow and white pages,
executives said their proposed UDDI standard would permit companies
to publish descriptive information about their organization and their
products in a way that could easily be located by electronic commerce
software programs used in business transactions.
The group said the proposed standard would go a step beyond being a
static "telephone directory" style look-up service. An additional
component of the registry was described as a "green pages," which
would allow companies to publish information about their business
practices.
This is intended to make it possible for electronic commerce programs
based on the XML standard to locate business partners automatically,
and buy and sell products or services. "Perhaps a better analogy would
be to the signalling system used by the telephone network to
automatically set up telephone calls," said James Utzschneider,
Microsoft's director of Web services for the company's business
applications division.
The three companies plan to create a prototype within a month..