A Boost for Interoperability

Q. What do you get if you turn 300 software developers worldwide loose for
two and a half months on the problem of achieving interoperability among some
major e-commerce apps and hardware?

A. Multiple advances and the end of Phase 1, according to the companies
involved — IBM i2 Technologies and Ariba .

The alliance is engaged in efforts to make interoperable the set of software
used by buyers and
suppliers to engage in e-commerce and collaborate over the Internet.
Executives from all three companies reported on their efforts at the Ariba
LIVE Miami conference today for business-to-business e-commerce

The alliance mapped progress against its unified blueprint for building
e-marketplaces, which provides an outline for how the partners’ software
works together and a timeline for delivering
additional interoperability from now through June 2001.

The goal of interoperability is to make it easier for buyers and suppliers to
connect with and transact in e-marketplaces.

The primary focus of the alliance’s initial interoperability work was
bringing together baseline components of the Ariba B2B Commerce Platform and
i2 TradeMatrix solution with IBM’s hardware platforms and middleware,
including WebSphere Business-to-Business Integrator, DB2 Universal Database
and Tivoli e-marketplace Manager.

Additionally, the Alliance’s interoperability work has incorporated IBM’s
Application Framework for e-business, which is IBM’s methodology — based on
thousands of customer
engagements — for developing e-business applications in an open
standards-based environment.

“The Alliance is proving that it is more efficient to develop e-marketplaces
in a component-based fashion,” said Jim Mackay, chief technology officer at
i2.

Also at the conference, Ariba was to preview AribaLive, its new personalized
Web-based application providing Ariba customers, partners, and internal
consultants with a start-to-finish methodology for implementing the Ariba B2B
Commerce Platform.