B2B Integration

Book excerpt: Business-to-business (B2B) integration is a buzzword which has been used a lot in recent years, with a variety of meanings. Starting with a clear technical definition of this term and its relation to topics like A2A (Application-to-Application), ASP (Application Service Provider), A2A, and B2C (Business-to-Consumer), Christoph Bussler outlines a complete and consistent B2B integration architecture based on a coherent conceptual model. He shows that B2B integration not only requires the exchange of business events between distributed trading partners across networks like the Internet, but also demands back-end application integration within business processes, and thus goes far beyond traditional approaches to enterprise application integration approaches. His detailed presentation describes how B2B integration standards like RosettaNet or SWIFT, the application integration standard J2EE Connector Architecture and basic standards like XML act together in order to enable business process integration. The book is the first of its kind that discusses B2B concepts and architectures independent of specific and short-term industrial or academic approaches and thus provides solid and long-lasting knowledge for researchers, students, and professionals interested in the field of B2B integration.