Business-to-business integration technology

Business-to-Business (B2B) integration technology refers to software systems that enable the communication of electronic business events between organizations across computer networks like the Internet or specialized networks like SWIFT [19]. A typical example of business events is a create purchase order sent from a buyer to a seller with the intent that the seller delivers the ordered products eventually, or a post invoice sent from a supplier to a buyer with the intent that the buyer fulfills his obligation to pay for delivered products. Business events carry business data as such and the sender's intent about what it expects the receiver to do. As business events are mission critical for the success of private, public, and government organizations, their reliable and dependable processing and transmission is paramount. Database technology is a platform technology that has proven to be reliable and dependable for the management of large sets of dynamic data across a huge variety of applications. In recent years, functionality beyond data management was added to database technology making it a feasible platform for business event processing in addition to data processing itself. New functionality like complex data types, audit trails, message queuing, remote message transmission or publish/subscribe communication fulfills basic requirements for business event processing and are all relevant for B2B integration technology. This contribution investigates the use of database technology for business event processing between organizations. First, a high-level conceptual model for B2B integration is introduced that derives basic business event processing requirements. A B2B integration system architecture outline is provided that defines the B2B integration system boundaries, before specific database functionality is discussed as implementation technology for business event processing. Some future trends as well as some proposals for extended database functionality is presented as a conclusion of this chapter.