Overview

The GXS Trading Grid® platform provides several key services to the applications and services that are used every day by over 40,000 trading partners. The key services are:

• Manage the relationships between partners
• Handle information from a variety of sources
• Provide event management

In addition to these functional kinds of services, a set of security and access services must strongly secure information while making it easily available to authorised parties.

The synchronisation of information is a large part of what business-to-business e-commerce is about. To support information consistency, the GXS Trading Grid provides a common data store for business information, a shared messaging gateway that acts as a communications protocol mediator, and a single global, virtual directory of trading partners. Regardless of the service or context, information and trading partner relationships are managed centrally and consistently across the entire GXS Trading Grid.

Event management services help businesses “manage by exception”. Rather than individual notification systems and logs, GXS Trading Grid applications send alerts and log messages to a central event management service using the GXS Trading Grid’s enterprise service bus. This enables businesses to manage alerts and exceptions in a single place regardless of what application generated it. It is also critical to supporting business processes that may require the use of many GXS Trading Grid applications (e.g. both Inventory Visibility and Order Lifecycle Visibility).

Finally, the core infrastructure of the GXS Trading Grid performs access management—allowing unprecedented access to information to those authorised, while barring everyone else. The GXS Trading Grid will offer a growing array of business services APIs (application programming interfaces) using web services. Industry standards such as WS-Security will ensure access to authorised parties only. The business services APIs will allow businesses access to information at a transaction level (“Where is my document?”), process level (“Have I been invoiced for this order?”), and aggregate level (“How was this supplier’s order fulfilment rate last year?”).

Benefits

The value of that common infrastructure is that regardless of what trading partners are doing on the GXS Trading Grid, they may rely on synchronised information, reliable event management and standard access. The benefits of GXS Trading Grid include:

• A common interface—Trading Grid Online—based on web standards. Trading Grid OnLine provides an aggregated interface to multiple Trading Grid systems using the common infrastructure and leveraging common user profiles and a common security service.
• Common data store: A common data store supports synchronised information.
• Centralised Point of Entry: The Shared Messaging Gateway enables GXS to deploy new communications protocols at the lowest cost and highest speed.
• Information Management: Information and trading partner relationships are managed centrally and consistently.
• Centralised Event Management: Alerts and log messages are handled by a central event management service, enabling businesses to manage alerts and exceptions in a single place, regardless of what application generated it.
• Security: Security and access services strongly secure information while making it easily available to authorised parties.