Doug Anderson, of Kleinschmidt Inc., brought up the case of his customer
using XML and wanting some means to differentiate test from production.
After giving him an overview of what's available out there in some of
the existing XML B2B frameworks, I asked Doug: "Out of curiosity, just
what is your customer doing in XML? What XML 'messages' are being used?
Which industry? Couldn't the customer have just used EDI? Why all this
rush to use XML?"
However, David Irvine, of Emco Limited, takes "exception" to these
questions. Unfortunately, David almost allows a non sequitur to get in
the way of the point he is trying to make. Apparently, since my
signature includes "Dublin" - "Dublin, Ohio, eh? Riding Sterling's
coatstrings?" - I must have some nefarious connection to Sterling
Commerce; else I would never question the lemming-like rush to use XML
for B2B messaging without any interoperable standards yet in place.
Indeed, David closes by urging me to "Keep on Sterling's payroll,
buddy," forever consigned to the trashheap of EDI.
Dear David:
Dublin, formerly a small rural village, is now a suburb of Columbus,
Ohio. Surely one who knows what a "Luddite" is would know that Columbus
is not only the capital of Ohio, but a large populous city, the nexus of
a great metropolis nestled in the great American Heartland, boasting
vast industrial, agricultural, educational, financial and scientific
wherewithal. Why, we even have butter cows at the State Fair and an
airport!
It is not inconceivable that two companies, even those with similar ZIP
codes, would have nothing much to do with each other, except that
Sterling - like many other world-class companies - is a FORESIGHT
customer and uses the EDISIM suite of EDI productivity tools. I am not
on Sterling's payroll. Actually, Sterling Commerce is not even in
Dublin; rather, it is located within the city of Columbus.
Now that we have that out of the way, let's examine the gist of your
letter:
Why go away from traditional EDI? You haven't been paying
attention, have you. First, traditional EDI is the domain
of the VANs, who charge by the kilocharacter. The web is
free - for companies doing real EDI, this is a significant
savings. Further, isn't the point of this forum to
recommend, refine, and encourage the use of XML. If we
want to make a paradigm shift in B-2-B communication, and
I, for one, do, then we have to support, help standardize,
and use, new key technologies.
The web, or more correctly - the Internet, is not free. But access to
the ubiquitous Internet does appear to be free simply because the costs
are amortized among other business functions like e-mail and the company
Web site, and porn and Yahoo Sports access for the employees. The
marginal costs of *transporting* volumes of EDI or XML B2B business
messages may indeed be very low, leading to the impression of "free."
One may use FTP, EDIINT AS1 S/MIME or AS2 HTTP to move EDI messages over
the Internet. But the effort to setup each of your trading partners
within Internet EDI needs to be considered and factored in: exchanging
public keys, e-mail IDs, FTP directories and addresses, URLs,
negotiating security methods and protocols etc. etc. for each trading
partner will be expensive maintenance. Some people will prefer to buy
an Internet EDI package like FORESIGHT's TradeSite/SDX or Cyclone
Interchange for handling their largest trading partners, where they may
quickly recoup half or more of their VAN charges, and let the
traditional VAN handle the remainder of the traffic. Remember: with a
VAN, you don't have to worry about the details of getting an interchange
addressed by a particular DUNS number to the appropriate party safely
and securely.
Often people assume that EDI (X12 or EDIFACT) requires a VAN, which has
obviously never been true; it's just that until the advent of the
ubiquitous Internet, the VAN provided protocol and time synchronization
(e.g., I'm using ZModem on a dial-up and my TP uses 3780 bisync, or I'm
a late riser and my TP is an early-bird). Now that, for all practical
purposes, everyone has 24 X 7 TCP/IP connectivity, the VAN's transport
function is relatively less valuable; but their directory services
(again, I don't have to fuss with URLs, e-Mail address, key exchange,
etc.) are still a compelling "value-add."
Is your argument rather for replacing EDI by XML, because EDI requires
VANs but XML is free over the Internet? If so, we've already dealt with
the erroneous notion that EDI can't be transported over the Internet.
And even XML messages would require the same services provided by either
a VAN or one of the Internet EDI packages, because of the security and
signature requirements and routing considerations. If you demur, and
say XML doesn't require all this baggage and insist that it's *REALLY*
free over the Internet, the same would necessarily be true of EDI:
just wrap the EDI interchange up in BASE64 encoding and slap the result
in-between an XML begin and end tag.
William J. Kammerer
FORESIGHT Corp.
4950 Blazer Memorial Pkwy.
Dublin, OH USA 43017-3305
+1 614 791-1600
Visit FORESIGHT Corp. at http://www.foresightcorp.com/
"Commerce for a New World"
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