Standards: We are working on platform independent standards related to Electronic Commerce, for example, Open Buying on the Internet (OBI) and Open Profiling Standard (OPS). Standards will play an important role in Electronic Commerce as the two parties engaging in a transaction need to communicate via a well-established mechanism. This is a very exciting time as the playing field is wide open. We have the opportunity to shape the future of Electronic commerce by helping to form the standards that will be used. The OBI standard is an open and flexible framework for business-to-business Internet commerce solutions, with an initial focus on automating high-volume, low-dollar transactions that account for 80% of most organizations purchasing activities. We are currently looking at enabling IBM's Net.Commerce , IBM's Electronic Commerce solution, for OBI. The OPS is a proposed standard which enables the trusted exchange of profile information between individuals and web sites, with built in privacy safeguards. Internet EDI: This is the transfer of business documents from one application or browser to another application or browser via the internet. EDI is a major part of Electronic Commerce and was the first large-scale business-to-business computer interaction. In 1995, IBM Global Services estimated that spending on EDI traffic will total $383 Billion in the year 2000 with the Internet EDI portion of that being $107 Billion. EDI makes great leaps in saving both time and money for businesses. Internet EDI is in its infancy, and we have the opportunity to enable businesses to work with each other in a drastically new way. There are many interesting topics to be explored here including security, audit trail, communication flow, and the interface between the internet EDI system and existing internal and external business systems. |
