It is critical for an executive to consider the Internet an extension of core business. Integration between hyperspace and the ‘real world’ is critical. At some point in the life of every eCommerce transaction, a product needs to be shipped, an aeroplane needs to be boarded, actual money needs to be exchanged.
The Amazon.coms of the eWorld must not only build innovative Web sites that can manage thousands of transactions per second, they must also integrate these eCommerce applications with traditional back-end databases to keep track of their customers and their orders, and with fulfilment systems to deliver the products and services the eGeneration is buying in ever-increasing numbers.
Even more challenging than building your new Internet architecture is understanding how to integrate it with your existing systems. Start-ups are typically considered the luckiest members of the Internet revolution since their existing systems are limited or non existent. Many existing systems are a generation or two behind the Internet applications, making integration even more difficult. This has caused many established companies to upgrade their back office systems to newer applications with more open interfaces. Bricks-and-mortar companies looking to extend their brands into cyberspace often have made enormous investments in mainframe-based systems, ERP applications, and data centres.
They need to integrate and automate their existing billing, accounting, and order processing systems with each other, with their new Web-enabled eCommerce applications, and often with other companies across the Internet. And they need to manage the business-to-business transaction chains that many new eCommerce business models require – whether it’s Web-based supply chains or industry-to-industry trading exchanges. The fact is, every eGeneration business is unique, with a different set of requirements. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) tools attempt to simplify the daunting task of bring the Web and existing systems together.
The visionary executive knows that all these Internet tools keep building on top of each other raising both the risks and rewards exponentially at each level. For those who make it this far, the benefits are about to start paying off with tremendous competitive advantages.
Using the Internet to simplify or automate business-to-business (B2B) transactions provides the greatest potential for value creation in eCommerce today. ‘Nearly 95% of all goods and services purchased by corporations are purchased with paper based processes.’ For companies who have made the investment in B2B to enable their business systems, the opportunity to gain competitive advantage by lowering purchasing costs is tremendous. At the same time, sellers cannot afford not to build channels to the exploding digital market.
B2B infrastructures like Ariba and CommerceOne provide buyer/ supplier networks that companies can plug into. The idea behind these solutions is to lower costs and streamline the supply chain, delivering benefits to all trading partners.
Potentially one of the most important technologies to emerge in the area of B2B eCommerce (and eCommerce in general) is XML. XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. It is a standard, generalised language for the structured storage and transfer of information. Its importance comes from its potential to become the lingua franca for business information on the Internet.
XML is a simplification of SGML (Standard Generalised Markup Language). SGML is a so-called meta-language which has been used to describe thousands of different document types in many fields, from the technical documentation for stealth bombers to musical notation. HTML is just one of these document types – a markup language written in SGML, and used to describe the presentation of documents on the Web. Unfortunately, one of the casualties of SGML’s flexibility is that it is a huge and complex language. XML is an abbreviated version of SGML, omitting the more abstruse and less commonly used parts of the language in return for being easier to use in applications, and easier to understand. XML should be thought of as a subset of SGML rather than an extended version of HTML.
XSL is a language to facilitate the transformation of XML documents into another form. This can be a different XML document format, an HTML document, or just about any other document format. The use of XSL for translation between XML languages is often referred to as XSLT, or ‘XSL for Transformation’. One of the main uses for XSL is to take the information from an XML document, merge it with specific presentation information, and create a document specific to a given medium. For example, an XSL stylesheet can be used to transform an XML document into HTML for display in a conventional Web browser. In addition to formatting for presentation, XSLT can be used to transform XML into other formats, allowing delivery of information across multiple channels from a single source, and de-coupling applications from volatile interfaces.
XLL is a standard language to describe links to resources, and to reference locations within those resources. XLL expands on the linking functionality of HTML by allowing more complex and flexible links to be constructed, in addition to the simple hyperlinks of HTML.
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