China Research Laboratory

e-Commerce

Internet offers manufactures, merchants and consumers a brand new trading opportunities which features fast access, convenience and ease of use. Based on the participants of the transactions, they can be categorized as business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), or even business-to-market (B2M). B2C e-Commerce has been in practice for some time now and there are ample success examples both in China and around the globe. B2B is so hot in the news media these days and B2M is emerging above the horizon as the next buzz word. As researchers at IBM CRL, we have developed a series of practical B2B e-Commerce technologies and solutions, some examples include OBI (Open Buying on the Internet), e-procurement , e-Marketplace and Virtual Enterprise. These affordable, scalable and easily deployed solutions enable participants to conduct their business ( sourcing, managing, purchasing ) over the Internet.

Dynamic e-Business Management System

With the fast development of e-business technologies and practices, lots of progresses have been made on the business models and the technologies underneath. More and more organizations ( business or otherwise ) are integrated together in a very interesting value chain in order to enable themselves the capability of fast response to the market demands. All such development is shedding lights to a new era of e-business, or Dynamic e-Business.

Dynamic e-Business refers to the business processes and associated systems that enable businesses to dynamically adapt to and therefore support the ever fast changing business strategies and behaviors. Businesses, together with their customers and partners can dynamically extend and cooperate their operation so that more advanced and flexible integration can be implemented to respond to market demands, find new partners, form alliances and execute strategy in a more standardized and open way ( e.g. Web Services) via exchange mechanism like e-marketplaces. IBM has a strong focus on the research of the development and key supporting technologies of dynamic e-business.

IBM China Research Lab is focusing on the research and development of the business models, solutions and technologies of dynamic e-business as part of the IBM research portfolio on the subject, aiming towards the vast amount of the less IT-savvy enterprises, or small and medium businesses that dominate the booming economy. We are developing a dynamic e-business management system to support the negotiation, connection and operation of dynamic e-business execution, including inter-business process modeling, contract negotiation, dynamic business process integration, business process negotiation.

Membership Management and Service Onboarding Framework for IBM Managed e-Hub

e-Marketplaces are flourishing, either in the form of public marketplace ( horizontals or verticals ) or as a private exchange within an enterprise. An effectively membership management function, which is re-implemented in every other such hubs, both at the level of business and individual user is becoming a key factor for the survival for these hubs. IBM Managed eHub aims at providing a common services for buyers, sellers, service providers and e-Marketplaces to connect to. The eHub will take care of interoperability of connecting to multiple parties using different transports, data formats and business protocols by offering membership management service,data format translation service, business protocol translation service and business flow management service. The service onboarding for managed ehub provides a basic framework for integrating external services with e-Marketplaces. The membership management service not only manages the profiles of business entities and business users, but also provides a profile propagation mechanism between e-Hub and services.