Joe Mullich
Freelance Technology Writer
818-907-9109
Microsoft
BUILDING A BETTER B2B
All together now
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Just ask Networld Exchange, a San Diego-based online exchange for the food service industry that handles daily orders ranging from $10 to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The exchange, built on the Windows DNA platform, electronically links manufacturers, buyers and retail outlets. "One of our buyers was able to cut down his cycle time from five hours to 10 minutes by integrating his back-end systems directly to our system," says John Schachat, executive vice president and CTO of Networld Exchange.
Suppliers also benefit through Networld Exchange. They can more accurately understand their customers' businesses, target promotions and surveys, run additional promotions based on the results of the surveys, and exchange real-time data so customers know precisely what products are in stock.
"Instead of dickering over a few pennies on price, suppliers are keen on the idea of using all this information so their sales force can show customers how to improve their operations, in everything from their 401K insurance to their systems' architectural design," Schachat says.
Win-win scenario
Those kinds of win-win scenarios are the holy grail of B2B integration. Connecting disparate systems is no easy task, though. The potpourri of challenges include legacy system interfaces, network latency and incompatible databases. Exchanges must battle a host of other issues as well, such as aggregating the content from different suppliers' catalogues. Another challenge is finding a common way to describe terms, so an office furniture supply exchange, for example, knows the difference between a chair and a stool.
"Companies often build their systems based on widely different architectural assumptions," says Uttam Narsu, an analyst with Giga Information Group Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. "Building a connection to a business partner or exchange requires a deep understanding of your internal systems. And as the Y2K situation showed, a lot of people don't understand their systems too well."
Microsoft's software runs more than 50% of the active online B2B exchanges today, according to Chris Atkinson, vice president of the company's Windows DNA Group. Windows DNA 2000 is a collection of eight server applications for developing, deploying and maintaining Web-based applications that are at the heart of Microsoft's efforts to promote business-to-business integration. The core of DNA is Windows 2000. The other building blocks are BizTalk Server 2000, the Visual Studio 2000 development tool, SQL Server 2000, Commerce Server 2000 and Microsoft Application Center 2000.
The Microsoft DNA architecture solves the communication problem among various subsystems, says Michael Saucier, chief technology officer and founder of Sequencia Corp., a Phoenix-based manufacturer of automation and enterprise integration solutions. "One way would be to plug in a middleware solution and [connect the applications together]. [Windows] DNA, on the other hand, permits the infrastructure to arrive automatically with the development architecture. So instead of spending 50% of our time gluing disparate applications together, we can now spend that time writing value-added application code."
Sequencia's processPoint.com portal is an Internet-based trading exchange that uses XML, the Microsoft BizTalk Framework and BizTalk Server 2000 to integrate the systems and processes of hundreds of manufacturers and their customers. The site permits users to contract out manufacturing of their products by matching their needs with available manufacturing capabilities. (next)