Solutions
Marketplaces, businesses, and directory providers are all attempting to solve these communication and transaction problems, and all are adopting distinct and divergent approaches centered on their own requirements. The result is a staggering diversity in approach, content, and architecture that is preventing the optimum utilization of B2B eCommerce by businesses of all sizes around the world.
The last few years have seen remarkable evolution in Web-based B2B eCommerce, electronic sales, online auctions, dynamic electronic marketplaces, and applications that process and route information. These comprise the essential foundation of B2B eCommerce infrastructure, ensuring an organization's ability to establish connectivity, put product or service information online, access and interact with a broad range of customers, process transactions, and fill orders.
Thus, the model of the business Internet must change, to move forward in ways that enable businesses to connect, to discover and reach each other, to learn what kinds of capabilities their potential trading partners have, and to continuously discover new potential trading partners, understand what their capabilities are, and seamlessly conduct eCommerce with them.
To accomplish this, a comprehensive solution is needed for businesses to publish their information to any customer or business partner around the world. Just as a common method for publishing data on the web spawned the evolution of e-business, a common means to publish information about business services will make it possible for organizations to quickly discover the right trading partners out of the millions that are online; to define how to conduct business once preferred businesses are discovered; and to create an industry-wide approach for businesses to quickly and easily integrate with their customers and partners on the Internet with information about their products and services, and how they prefer to be integrated into each other's systems and business processes.