eWeek article about ebXML

[Robert S Sutor <sutor@us.ibm.com>]

FYI

Bob
_________
Bob Sutor
Director, IBM e-business Standards Strategy

Office 716-243-2445 / Cellular 716-317-6899
IBM Tieline 320-9138 / Fax 716-243-1778




eWEEK, 12/7/00 -- Backers to demo Electronic Business XML spec
By Roberta Holland, eWEEK
December 7, 2000 4:38 PM ET
http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011,2662455,00.html

More than a dozen companies involved with the Electronic Business XML
effort will gather next week to show a working demo of the specification.

The so-called "proof of concept" demonstration is slated to take place
Tuesday in San Francisco. Vendors participating in the event and the drive
for the new specification include IBM, Sun Microsystems Inc., Cisco Systems
Inc., Extol, Fujitsu, Interwoven, IPNet, Netfish Technologies Inc.,
Savvion, Sterling Commerce Inc., Viquity, XML Global and XMLSolutions Corp.

The demonstration will show that ebXML works and is interoperable.
Participants also are expected to announce that the delivery date has been
accelerated from May, as originally planned, to as soon as March, sources
said.

"This is a huge milestone for global e-commerce, showing real-world
scenarios implemented across multiple products and on different operating
systems," said JP Morgenthal, chief technology officer of XMLSolutions, in
McLean, Va., of the demo. Often standards are only theoretical constructs
when they first emerge, rather than a working, interoperable specification,
he said.

The standards effort was created jointly by OASIS (the Organization for the
Advancement of Structured Information Standards) and the United Nations'
branch in charge of e-business.

Buy-in from EDI backers

The goal of the initiative is to create a standard framework for businesses
to exchange data over the Internet, without having to go through the
expense of Electronic Data Interchange. However, officials involved with
the effort say companies that have already invested in EDI won't have to
dump their existing system but can instead leverage ebXML on top of what
they already have in place.

"The major significance of ebXML is that, really within the last year, [the
effort] has managed to focus and direct the EDI community and really get
them to accept that XML and Internet technologies are their future," said
Bob Sutor, IBM's director of e-business standards strategies, in Somers,
N.Y.

Sutor estimated companies will start coming out with products that support
ebXML in the third quarter of next year.

The effort has six general specifications, which are modular in nature and
can be implemented piecemeal. They are: requirements, business processes,
core components, transport routing and packaging, registry and repository,
and trading partners. The group is furthest along with transport routing
and packaging, which is the low-level messaging layer.

Bill Smith, manager of Sun's XML technology center and member of the ebXML
executive committee, agreed that being able to demonstrate running code is
an important milestone.

The effort will usher in "the next generation for global trade," said
Smith, who also serves as president of OASIS.

"We're not looking to do something [only useful] for the next six months,"
said Smith, in Cupertino, Calif. "We're looking to do the work in a very
short window, but we expect the work to live for decades."