B2B Integration: A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-Commerce

This comprehensive guide reveals the key elements of successful B2B integration and collaborative e-commerce, by highlighting business needs, technologies, and development strategies. It seeks to equip companies with practical guidelines for quickly implementing an effective B2Bi strategy, and to prepare them for the next wave of B2B integration and collaborative e-commerce. It clarifies the intricate dependencies among all the components of B2Bi, including integration patterns, enterprise application integration (EAI), business process management (BPM), Internet security, XML, Web services, middleware technologies, and integration brokers. Included is discussion of future technologies that will have a significant impact on B2Bi architectures, such as intelligent software agents, wireless technologies, and peer-to-peer computing. This reference provides a framework for the design, development and implementation of B2B integration, along with several case studies.