Service-Oriented Architecture - A New Alternative to Traditional Integration Methods in B2B Applications

Nowadays, Business-to-Business (B2B) has become one the most important forms for e-commerce implementations that allows organizations (both partners and competitors) to cooperate in terms of building virtual corporations to satisfy customer and market needs. Almost all B2B applications have special requirements regarding to ability to be changed dynamically and flexibly due to market ever-changing needs. Traditional methods for implementing and integrating B2B applications have faced many problems that lead to failure in fulfilling these needs effectively. Serviceoriented architecture (SOA) is an emerging architecture methodology that comes with set of concepts, standards, and technologies that make it the endeavor for fulfilling these needs. This paper introduces a B2B case study to show how SOA allows integration between different systems not by rebuilding them from scratch, rather, by leveraging current assets in a way to make them more dynamic, and easy to be changed according to business needs and market circumstances.