| ------------------------------------- The eBusiness Bulletin e-newsletter of BrainStorm Group June 21, 2001 ------------------------------------- ==================================================== -- Introduction
- XML, EDI and UDDI ==================================================== One of the main problems of the technology industry is that we are making up acronyms faster than we can explain them. We also make up new words (Webify or web-ify) faster then they can be put into our spell checker and we use old words but assign new meanings to them. Those of us in technology are immersed in this new word salad, and it only strikes home when we're talking to our friends or relatives and they haven't got the vaguest idea what we are saying. Then we apologize for speaking Geek. But the acronyms above are the foundations of e-commerce. Kate Fessenden spoke of XML and EDI at the eBusiness Integration Conference - Chicago. EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is 25 years old now and was the first way to do e-commerce transactions. It is horrendously complicated and expensive, but it works and many large companies use it. XML (eXtensible Markup Language) has given new life to EDI because small and medium sized enterprises (SME) can use XML to communicate with EDI, thus sparing them the expense of buying costly EDI and the plethora of programmers to maintain it. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is what made the Internet what it is today. Anyone with a browser can read text and graphics on a web page. XML is similar and adds tags so that business logic can be used for transactions on the Web. The different dialects of XML use different tags for different industries. XML can work with any platform, just like HTML. It is "agnostic", another word with new meaning that Kate used several times in her presentation. In the original Greek it means "not knowing" but today it is used to mean "no preference", meaning it can work with any system or application with a minimum of fuss. In our From the Trenches article, Scott Cosby covers UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) launched by IBM, Microsoft Corp. and Ariba Inc. UDDI is both a set of standards and a repository to use them. The promise of UDDI is the ability to share Web Services as reusable components. According to Scott, it will enable an e-commerce initiative to be launched with no more difficulty than launching a web site. There is a lot of industry interest in UDDI and it's growing fast with new news almost weekly. Sometimes it seems the original meaning of "agnostic" would apply more now. Let's talk in New York, Take a carriage ride through Central Park? Catch a Ballgame?
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Kate Fessenden is the Research Director for Enterprise XML at the Aberdeen Group. She has eighteen years of experience in marketing and market research in the high tech industry. EDI is twenty-five years old, and is being used more than ever. EDI has always been very complex and very expensive, which limited its use to very large companies with legions of programmers. Even some large companies never adopted it, and almost no SMEs (Small and Medium size Enterprises). The forecasts are that this year and next there will be much wider use of XML to EDI to XML, and that by 2002 Internet EDI will account for about 50% of EDI transactions. The key to growth here is that many SMEs can use EDI today by way of a thin client. XML is the enabler here, being totally "agnostic" and able to sit on any platform or system. XML is cheap and universal, and can communicate with expensive EDI systems for B2B applications. Suddenly, there is a playing field where almost anyone can play. The impetus for this is the Internet, where all business is sure to become e-business. Soon there will no longer be any line between traditional business and e-business. SMEs are the largest new users of EDI. As to the question of whether you should re-engineer or webify to do e-business, Kate thinks that both are necessary. Everyone has to get on the Web, but getting there is going to require some serious planning. It isn't easy and while the changes are being made it would be a mistake not to streamline the business processes and get rid of old junk you don't need. But because XML is at the bottom of all this, all the work will be truly portable and will future-proof the business. It works with anything and it will work with everything that is coming. She does recommend webifying the non-critical EDI applications first, and points out that there will always be some EDI transactions that you would never want out there on the Web. XML/EDI is also working in indirect materials procurement. These are things like office supplies, computers, travel services, catering and other things not needed for direct production. Getting these items has always been expensive in paper and time and a lot can be saved by taking it all online. Since the competition is only a click away, you need to keep your brand in front and show how your product is different. The problem is getting enough rich content into the online catalogs and content management software is the best solution. Direct materials is different. These are items that support a business's core products. They are strategic purchases that are usually customized and are much harder to webify. The paper trail can be cut down now, but real inroads in direct materials has to wait for collaborative commerce and exchanges to take hold. Kate said the general fear of all of this online activity getting rid of voice communication is groundless. The voice communication will always be there, but data infrastructure will be more certain, secure, easy and will save a lot of money. The important dialects of XML now are RosettaNet, ebXML, BizTalk, cXML, and xCBL. The dialects are being created for specific needs. The press has over-hyped the dialect problem. Kate said it isn't really all that difficult, and is more like hearing music while you read the sheet music. You can listen to Beethoven or the Beatles, but the underlying notes on the sheet music are the same. Seamless data transformation engines for dialects exist now. The biggest problem isn't dialects, but the human problem of how we name/label things: is it a "last name" or an "Lname" or "surname". She gave the example of Wal-Mart having thousands of suppliers, all who can now trade using a thin client from Wal-Mart. EDI is impossible to read for a non-programmer, but through XML anyone can read it. Kate said that sending an invoice to a large company can cost them as much as $250 in processing costs. Another example she gave is the car company that has a lot where the newly painted cars sit while the paint hardens. It is very important that birds not fly over this lot. They found that fake owls on poles keep them away but the best owls are made by one guy who doesn't even own a computer. The company's system is universal enough so that he can go to the public library, get on the Internet, go to the company site, enter a password and present his bill for the owls. XML is verbose, but there are good compression technologies available that can compress up to 97%. And security is a big issue. ANSI, EDIFACT and X12.58 security requirements, encryption, digital signatures and digital certificates need to be enabled. Kate said that one thing to be sure of is that the security solution doesn't get stripped when it goes through a firewall. If it does, the transaction could become vulnerable. First came Batch EDI with 300,000 enterprise users. Then came e-commerce with one to one transactions. Kate called this time "brochure land" where people found what they needed online, then bought it offline. Next comes virtual trading communities bringing buyers and sellers with common needs together, and the next stage is collaborative commerce which adds support for other business processes before, during and after the order. The vendors are taking the initiative because DISA, who controls EDI, hasn't bothered to do anything with XML standards for two years. The X12 Standard Table Data has been XML-ized by vendors and they provide seamless conversion of data from EDI to XML now. Each one has done it differently, but there is a solution that will work for you out there. In order for all this to work, companies need to become logistically savvy. What XML has done is to breath new life into EDI by enabling it for general e-commerce. EDI was dying, but Kate says it will probably continue to exist through our lifetimes. It allows indirect and direct materials procurement over the Web. It gives SMEs an entry point into exclusive EDI domains and the e-commerce world. And it is "agnostic", everyone can use it. Her list of resources:
Scott Cosby was representing UDDI.org, an association co-sponsor of the eBusiness Integration Conference Series. In his "day job" Scott is managing IBM's e-business technology marketing team in Cupertino, California and is responsible for advancing the adoption and development of e-business technologies. Scott began by explaining what UDDI actually is. UDDI stands for Universal Description, Discovery and Integration initiative. It was started in September of 2000 by a number of companies to address some initiatives in the B2B space but has evolved into the Web Services space. The initiative is two things: First it is a standards specifications made up of technical standards, API specifications, interaction protocols and other things that are necessary to describe and define web services. The second part is a shared operation of a global registry, which is taking those specifications and building a repository to capture those descriptions and specifications. There is an operational registry in Beta mode now, that moved out of Beta testing in May. So UDDI is a specification and an implementation that can be used right now. There is a broad partnership addressing these issues with 280 companies using it. There is very strong interest in the industry. Web Services are a new paradigm concept in the software industry and is about taking applications and application logic and creating self-contained and self-described units, whose functionality can then be extended across the Internet. It uses standard and common protocols such as http and XML as foundation technologies that can be used across platforms. And it doesn't matter in what form the functionality exist. It could be in a JAVA environment, a dot-com environment or in a legacy application. The Web Services will wrap the functionality and be able to present it to anyone across the Internet so you don't have to integrate disparate programs. You can mix and match these applications to fit whatever you are doing and then you can do it with anybody out there. It is like running a stock ticker on your own site. In layman's terms, it means you don't have to buy new software and load it on your machine to do a task. You can just go to the program on the net and use what you need, when you need it. Right now if you want to create pdf documents you have to buy Adobe Acrobat and put it on your machine. But what if you only need it a few times a year? With Web Services, you can send the file with instructions for what you want and a way of paying for it and it will come right back to you. Adobe didn't have to change their intellectual capital in order to do this, they only had to expose it in a different way. Bid processes and auctions will do well with this too. Handling bids and getting payment verification and arranging for shipping can all be brought under one roof. Eventually Web Services will change the way business is done opening a very rich and dynamic array of services that can be accessed. One of the present problems UDDI will solve is the lack of a repository of services that people can easily see and use. You need some kind of functionality for a problem but where do you find it? There is also the cost of developing partners. Dynamically discovering partners is hard, then you have to integrate. With UDDI, the integration is already there, and you will be able to see potential partners in the registry. For a small business selling a unique product, often their only current availability now is through the yellow pages. But with next day shipping they have the potential of having a world market if people know they exist. UDDI describes services, discovers and displays the participants, then integrates them. UDDI is not an open standard. It is the de facto standard and it does have industry support but it is still an initiative. The UDDI people decided to go for implementation rather than trying to create a standards body first, because they thought it was the fasted way to develop the technology. It seems to be working. The time line is to have it be an open standard in 15 to 18 months. Eventually it will be managed by an independent agency that has wide representation across the business spectrum, hopefully in 2002. To use it, the first thing to do is to register your business by signing up on the registry and telling them who you are, what you do and the services you offer. This is posted into the public registry. To find services, just do a query which can be done on a cell phone or PDA, or a laptop. It can also be done machine to machine. Once you find what you want, the integration part comes in. Using RossettaNet or ebXML or one of the others you can robustly describe your services and create the means to access them. Application service providers can list to the registry and search engines can search the registry making discovery that much easier. The data is broken down into three categories called white pages, yellow pages and green pages using phone book analogy. The white pages are who the business is, the name and description, contact information and known identifiers. The yellow pages are categorization. Businesses are listed under industry, product category and location. The green pages is new and describes the services available for that company, and just what you have to do to invoke the services including security, how to set it up, what you send and what you get back and so on. In the future, UDDI solutions will also be used internally to enhance integration within the company. UDDI is both a specification and an operational node that is available on the Internet for e-commerce applications. There's a lot happening in this arena and it is changing on a week to week basis. The potential here is just awesome. Check out the Web site: www.uddi.org.
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