An e-business standards consortium is aligning its software testing
as a further step towards letting companies in different industries
communicate better.
Santa Ana, Calif.-based RosettaNet said it is working with eBusinessReady
to help certify its RosettaNet B2B software for Web services
between companies that in the past might not have traded with each other.
EBusinessReady is an industry-neutral software-testing program, under joint
partnership between Drummond Group and the Uniform Code Council (UCC),
which also oversees RosettaNet.
Mark Monaghan, a senior director at UCC, told internetnews.com the
end game is to get more companies in the supply chain to adopt these
B2B-ready program standards.
“It used to be that the clothing guys would only work with the clothing
guys; the food guys would only work with the food guys. There is a crossover
now where you have industries such as chipmakers selling directly to
industries outside their own communities and even directly to retail shops,”
Monaghan said. “So what you have is a company like Sony or HP selling
directly into Wal-Mart , where that would not have happened
ten years ago.”
Now, according to Monaghan, companies can communicate more easily,
because they didn’t have to go outside the supply chain to certify their
communications. They just need to map that data inside their legacy systems,
“which is what these companies tell us they would rather spend their time
working on,” he said.
Now working with Lawrenceville, N.J.-based eBusinessReady, RosettaNet
said its clients can use the existing eBusinessReady framework to
certify application software products with supply chain companies looking to
implement RosettaNet-compliant systems.
“The partnership between UCC, a multi-industry standards organization,
and Drummond Group, a leading compliance, interoperability and conformance
testing company, offers tremendous benefits and greater reach to companies
seeking to certify their software products that support RosettaNet
e-business standards,” said Kraemer.
As Monaghan put it, RosettaNet has been a “barnstormer,” making sure its
software is compliant with the rest of the world. The consortium recently
established an Architecture Advisory Committee so it could sift
through the myriad emerging technologies and related architectural
frameworks that are introduced into the marketplace, such as multiple
messaging services and electronic business XML (ebXML).
“It’s important to keep a consistent certification technology,” Monaghan
said. “We want the vendors to get good interoperability and allow the
community to grow quicker.”
He said RosettaNet expects to
publish their results in either late 2004 or early 2005. Work on defining
Business Web services has just started and guidelines are not expected until
2005.
The partnership also was prompted by today’s news that Global eXchange
Services (GXS) successfully completed its beta trial. The B2B Internet
commerce operation that provides supply chain services and software to 60
percent of Fortune 500 companies just ended a three-month evaluation.
GXS said it successfully tested its Application Integrator v 4.1 and Enterprise System
v 7.5 products against the RosettaNet Implementation Framework (RNIF) and
Partner Interface Process (PIP) 3C3.
GXS has been actively involved with RosettaNet since 1998, and
serves as a member of the consortium’s Solution Provider Global
Industry Council. In 2003 and 2004, the company was awarded 15 RosettaNet Ready
software compliance badges for various product offerings.
“EBusinessReady extends the successful RosettaNet Ready software
compliance initiative to a broader market scope, promoting a single
methodology across all UCC certification program initiatives,” David
Kraemer, vice president marketing and industry development at Global
eXchange Services, said in a statement.