A Comparison of B2B e-Service Solutions.pdf

A Comparison of B2B E-Service Solutions Dan Jong Kim, Manish Agrawal, Bharat Jayaraman, and H. Raghav Rao The Internet is evolving not only to provide information and e-commerce transactions, but also to act as the platform through which services are delivered to businesses and cus- tomers. These electronic services or e-services could become a key part of the value pro- vided by many businesses [2, 5, 10]. At the core of this evolution is Extensible Markup Language (XML), which has emerged as the foundation of all architectures suggested for such services. XML simplifies the exchange of information by letting users define their own syntax and use underlying technologies of the Internet. However, while organiza- tions can define XML syntax to solve their specific problems, the multitude of syntax (schemas) creates incompatibility problems with schemas developed by others. This is one of the reasons why major organizations are creating business-to-business (B2B) XML framework standards to enable interoperability. To overcome these problems, efforts are underway to develop standards for e-services including eCo by a consortium led by CommerceNet; RosettaNet by a con- sortium that includes IBM, Microsoft, EDS, SAP, Cisco systems, Compaq and Intel; BizTalk by Microsoft; e-speak by Hewlett Packard (HP), and several others. Since these B2B interoperability standards are likely to be very important in the way busi- nesses interact with each other in the future, an overview of these standardization efforts is certain to be of considerable importance to the IS community. This article describes the components (core modules of platforms for linking Internet-based serv- ice providers) of e-services and compares popular B-to-B e-commerce frameworks based on their support for e-service components. E-services In general, e-services focus on providing services through the Internet. E-services have been viewed as Internet-based customer service and online account management serv- i