Business Services Networks: Delivering the Promises of B2B

The fundamental challenge of e-commerce is enabling companies to do business with one another across a network, despite different business processes and computer systems. Traditionally, these problems were overcome through custom point-to-point integration or Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) networks. These expensive, time-consuming approaches make economic sense only when companies do a lot of business together. The promise of the Internet, by contrast, is an open e-business platform where companies can do business spontaneously with anyone, anywhere, anytime. Business Services Networks fulfill that vision. This vision paper also presents CommerceNet’s role in catalyzing industrial adoption.