What is the most prevalent, stable and future ready B2B protocol (preferably open)?

Question

I have been asked to tie in Ariba's PunchOut by a client's supplier into our procurement system. The procurement module is a small part of a Java EE application running mostly on JBoss.

Poking around the last couple days it does seem that a cXML PunchOut implementation is pretty popular but that doesn't make it correct. To say I am nervous about implementing a proprietary 'protocol' is putting it lightly. Since it is only one client's one vendor pushing for this, I still have a lot of latitude.

I've been kind of thrown into this space. What is considered the industry B2B standard for this kind of thing? Is there anything existing or emerging as a more open standard for B2B transactions? What is the most popular modern approach to this kind of problem?

Answer 1

Most legacy systems use EDI over a VAN and it is still used by the majority of vendors. The standards body that developed these standards also developed an XML dialect of EDI.

Answer 2

I've been working with Ariba's punch-out for over 4 years and I was thrown into it as well. My take on it is that since Ariba seems to be the major player and they started or least are heavily involved in the cXML specification it will be a pretty safe bet to use. Also major ERP systems such as SAP and Oracle support this xml format since we have a few clients who use cXML but don't use Ariba.

Is it the only format? No, though so far I've only seen cXML used for the actual punch-out even if another format is used for the other documents. For those other documents I've seen other xml formats like xCBL and of course straight EDI. Realistically, it will depend on what kind of market your vendors are in and probably what size. Our particular business has the range from strict EDI to "what is B2B".