Enabling Flexible, Adaptive B2B E-Commerce Workflows

We believe a source of dynamic organizational processes poised for exponential growth is B2B electronic commerce. In addition to serving as aggregators of product information, all major electronic marketplaces (i2, Ariba, CommerceOne, et al.) are developing infrastructure for the sharing of business process definitions and the augmentation of inter-organizational workflows. XML frameworks for the global publication of process information are proliferating (RosettaNet, et al.) with the intention of WWW process discovery and automated inter-organizational interaction. Highly influential consortiums of Fortune 500 organizations are introducing standard extensible frameworks for process discovery and automated webbased business process (workflow) interaction (UDDI). Working, practical infrastructure is rapidly being realized to implement the global virtualization of organizations that has been predicted for some time.