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Managing your data the XML way. (Data Management).

Article Excerpt
The holy grail of e-business and Internet technologies is the ability to enable cost-effective business-to-business transactions with trading partners, eliminating the inefficiencies of paper trails, duplicate data processing, and rekeying of information. Companies are increasingly calling on IT departments to develop a network of relationships encompassing suppliers, business partners, and internal activities that is accessible, integrated, scalable, and resilient.

To stay competitive, companies must be able to transform and exchange business data freely and dynamically between their own systems and those of their business partners via the Internet. This involves integration of many corporate databases, applications, Web sites, and business partners.

Web services promise to provide a way to more easily and cost-exchange, transform, and access corporate data on many different incompatible systems, both within and beyond the walls of the organization. The Web services concept uses the Internet and an open set of standards based on XML as the common data interchange format.

But before B2B or Web services can be considered, an organization may have to deal with significant internal challenges to ensure the interoperability of various systems and applications as well as the integration of various sources of critical data. Corporate entities generate vast amounts of data every day--transactions, inventory, product information, order status, sales and customer data, invoices, payments, business contacts, reports, statistical data, Web access logs, and so on. In most cases data is stored and managed by various database systems. As businesses grow over time or rapidly evolve through mergers and acquisitions, they acquire many heterogeneous systems that may not easily communicate with one another.

As companies try to steer a course through the hype and develop strategies for implementing B2B and Web services, they will face the challenge of integrating these existing relational databases, EDI infrastructures, and text formats with XML. Real-time XML-driven middleware solutions will play an increasingly important role in helping companies integrate their existing data assets with XML to enable effective B2B relationships.

The role of data integration middleware in enabling effective B2B

B2B Hurdles

For B2B to realize its potential, transactions between business partners must be conducted electronically in an interactive manner to eliminate tedious manual processes such as rekeying information. The challenge is that no two companies have the same database structure or format their data in the same way. The ways in which we store...

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