Predictions for the Next Ten Years

SOA and B2B Gateway Software — A Look into 2020 (10 years in the Future)

By Brian Greenberg
GXS Senior Product Manager for B2B Software

B2B e-commerce has several driving factors: lowering the cost of the individual business transaction, increasing the speed of information exchange between partners, and increasing the ease of business processing for both suppliers and consumers. As a result, certain aspects of the B2B Gateway will change over the next 10 years in order to allow the systems to keep up with expectations.

A Service-Oriented Approach

One of the ways the B2B Gateway will change in the future is by increasing its flexibility in order to work across and meet the rapidly-changing demands of multiple B2B e-commerce markets. This will be enabled by leveraging a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach to build out processes with reusable components. With an SOA, the B2B Gateway will have enhanced capabilities to interact with the ever-changing back-office systems within companies. It is often the changes with the interface between two systems that slows the development process and inhibits faster integration of the solution. For example, one airline company has 250 key applications as part of their business processing. The tangible benefit of their SOA design allows the airline to rapidly deploy changes to the infrastructure supporting those systems without impacting customers who want to change their seat assignment or the credit card they are using for the trip. An SOA allows for those integration points to be tested and verified for accuracy without impacting the production systems. If the B2B Gateway can truly leverage SOA interfaces to the other applications, then the Gateway will be able to help accelerate changes to the B2B e-commerce process rather than being an integration point requiring extensive re-testing.

Answering the Call for Increased Functionality

Looking 10 years into the future, B2B Gateways will be called upon to have greater overall functionality. In addition to data translation components to reconcile the formatting between the source and destination, and the capabilities to build out the workflow process, B2B Gateways will be asked to provide capabilities such as:

• Pre-processing validation of the data. Today, this may include checks to ensure all fields of an order are completed, such as the shipping address, before sending the data for translation. In the future, it might include pre-processing to confirm that a particular item is available for fulfillment from the appropriate warehouse before it is submitted.
• Providing Trading Partners with more real-time status information in regard to data flowing through the Gateway. Companies will not only want to know that documents have been processed and received; they will also want the status of trading partner invoices and exception notifications for orders that might require special processing at the factory.  Businesses will seek both the immediacy and quantity of real-time information that enables them to be more responsive to their customers, differentiating them from their competition.
• Built-in alerts and triggers for automatic supply chain management notifications. For example, processing volumes might start to reach system capacity during peak times. It will be the Gateway’s responsibility to monitor and anticipate such situations in advance, providing the necessary alerts and recommendations.

By leveraging an SOA design approach, B2B Gateways in 2020 will be of a higher function and flexibility, and of more value to all the members within the B2B e-commerce supply chain.