ISOLATING B2B INFRASTRUCTURE UNCERTAINTY
by Morgan Gerhart, META Group Inc

Isolating B2B Infrastructure Uncertainty: Server Infrastructure Strategies

Many infrastructure requirements of system-to-system (S2S) business-to-business (B2B) e-business will be dictated by business partners and trading relationships. To ensure overall e-business flexibility, organizations must, to the greatest extent possible, abstract the ever-changing S2S infrastructure from the core internal application infrastructure.

META Trend:

Enterprise application integration (EAI) infrastructure will provide the backbone for e-business initiatives (especially cross-enterprise) through 2005, becoming critical in organizations focused on mergers/acquisitions, customer relationship management, and supply chain integration. Integration servers will evolve from intra-enterprise-focused message brokering via simple message queuing technologies (2000/01) to B2B-focused event-driven process flow modeling and control (2002/03). By 2002/03, integration server and application server technology synergy will lead to middleware convergence.

Through 2002/03, the technical infrastructure required to implement system-to-system (S2S) business-to-business (B2B) initiatives (e.g., transport services, format services, security services, transaction-handling services, process automation services, quality-of-service services) will rapidly mature and standardize.

However, through at least 2004/05, these standards' the rate of change and the continued jockeying between general infrastructure vendors (e.g., Microsoft, IBM, BEA, Oracle, Sun), enterprise application integration (EAI) vendors (e.g., SeeBeyond, Mercator, New Era of Networks, Tibco, Vitria, webMethods), and "B2B" vendors (e.g., Extricity, Cyclone Commerce, NetFish, Ariba, Commerce One, Vignette, IPNet) will force users to continually change and evolve S2S B2B infrastructures. More important, even as S2S B2B infrastructure technologies mature and standardize, most organizations' macro business environments will remain in flux, requiring S2S infrastructure flexibility as partner and trading community business relationships change.

The emergence of an interoperable, ubiquitous (a.k.a. adopted and implemented by virtually all organizations) S2S adapter - analogous to the interoperability and ubiquity of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) browser used in person-to-system (P2S) scenarios - capable of describing and executing all levels of B2B infrastructure services will free users from the need to implement multiple S2S technologies. However, though numerous vendors and standards bodies are simultaneously competing and cooperating to define this standardized infrastructure, we do not see a mature, ubiquitous standard emerging before 2004/05. In the interim, users will be forced to implement various S2S technologies to meet the widely varying requirements of multiple, differing trading-partner relationships.

"Interim" S2S B2B Infrastructure Selection Although several drivers define the S2S B2B infrastructure required by a given trading relationship, they can be loosely segmented into business process drivers (defined by the complexity of the shared business process) and business partner drivers (defined by the business relationships between the parties).

Infrastructure organizations that base S2S infrastructure selection solely on business process drivers risk selecting infrastructure that is at odds with business partner drivers (i.e., the technology selected is too complex for the partner to implement/manage or too expensive given the value of the trading relationship). In fact, in most situations, business partner drivers will have greater influence on S2S infrastructure selection than business process drivers.

Therefore, infrastructure organizations must consider both sets of drivers when selecting S2S B2B infrastructure. Simultaneously, business leaders must also analyze business process drivers when shaping overall e-business strategy (i.e., the implementation of complex stateful process automation requires infrastructure that may be beyond the technical sophistication of certain partners). This is why S2S B2B infrastructure planning must be performed in parallel with overall B2B business planning.

Because most organizations will be forced to support B2B initiatives of varying levels of business process and business partner complexity (as defined by the "answers" to the aforementioned drivers), we believe organizations will be forced to support multiple S2S interaction mechanisms (i.e., SMTP "mail attachments," FTP, XML over HTTP, EDI, message-oriented middleware, stateful process automation toolkits) through 2003/04.

Indeed, with the exception of database replication, we believe organizations must implement infrastructure that supports at least one mechanism for each of the distinct S2S patterns. In certain situations (e.g., a dominant partner dictates a technical solution to a given pattern), organizations may have to support multiple infrastructures per pattern. Overall S2S B2B flexibility is gained not by attempting to "standardize" on one S2S pattern (which will actually reduce flexibility), but rather by insulating core applications from the specific infrastructure used to expose applications to external trading partners.

"Interim" S2S B2B Infrastructure Implementation For greatest e-business flexibility, users must abstract the infrastructure a business process (a.k.a. application or, more likely, set of integrated applications) is built on from the infrastructure used to expose this business process to the outside world. This is the role of a sound EAI infrastructure within an overall S2S strategy (see SIS Delta 835, 1 May 2000). This abstraction then enables the organization to share a given business process with different communities served by different S2S infrastructures (e.g., sending invoices to customers either through e-mail attachments, EDI, or XML/SOAP). Without this abstraction, users will be forced to modify applications every time the S2S B2B infrastructure changes.

Business Impact:

Constantly changing business relationships will prevent organizations from selecting a single business-to-business solution.

Bottom Line:

For greatest system-to-system (S2S) business-to-business flexibility, organizations must implement multiple S2S infrastructure solutions and abstract (though enterprise application integration infrastructure) this infrastructure from the organization's core applications. META Group Inc, 208 Harbor Dr., P.O. Box 120061, Stamford, CT 06912-0061, www.metagroup.com 203-973-6700, Facsimile 203-359-8066.