Online business to business integeration portals

B2B integration or B2Bi is basically about the secured coordination of information among businesses and their information systems. It promises to dramatically transform the way business is conducted between partners, suppliers and customers or buyers. All companies (large, medium, small, or new) can experience increased growth and success through tightly integrated partnerships. Companies, from across a variety of industries, are embracing B2Bi and realizing the enormous competitive advantage it provides, through faster time to market, reduced cycle times, and increased customer service. Through integration of business and technical processes, companies are able to strengthen relationships with partners and customers, achieve seamless integration inside and outside the enterprise, gain real-time views of customer accounts, increase operational efficiencies, and reduce costs. An Intimidating Task B2Bi is easier said than done - it is indeed a daunting effort. Integration is a big challenge, especially for global corporations that have hundreds to thousands of trading partners. It is an extremely daunting effort to manage the integration of so many business processes and can turn out to be a time consuming, complex, and expensive task. With the advent of new technologies, the potential for disparity further increases and makes the exchange of electronic information even more complicated. Essential Features of a B2B Integration Solution Without the right selection of B2Bi solution(s) that meet your business and technical requirements, any integration implementation will be doomed. Before a company selects any B2Bi solution, it has to consider the following: Can the solution evolve with the company, with the industry, and with the IT industry? Does it offer comprehensive functionality with the flexibility to support third-party software vendors, and connect existing and new systems in a common framework? Does it work within scalable environments to accommodate customer and trading partner systems as well? Does it support open standards? So, what are the key features that a company should look for before investing in any B2Bi software solution? Firstly, the integration solution should be able to enable any transaction, any time - end-to-end and partner-to-partner. It should be able to fully automate real-time exchange of data between disparate applications. Secondly, the solution should be able to conduct all transactions securely, maintain audit logs, etc. Thirdly, the solution should support diverse sets of file formats, protocols, and security standards. Fourthly, the solution should be based on open standards that allow a company and its partners to send transactions using any combination of applications and file formats, telecommunication pathways, communication protocols and B2B protocols. Lastly, the solution should be scalable, that is, companies should be able to scale it horizontally and vertically. Further, it should offer robust load balancing features, critical to the success of large applications. www.exporttrust.com/tradenews