The RosettaNet consortium began in June '98 as an effort to define e-commerce guidelines based on XML technology. At its debut, the group, led by Intel, vowed to have its guidelines ready by Feb. 2, a date they dubbed "eConcert Readiness Day."
That readiness promise has been kept, if only barely, by this group of sixty or so high-tech manufacturers, distributors and suppliers - all of who have high hopes for XML. On Feb. 2, Intel and Arrow Electronics declared victory by exchanging their first official XML-based purchase order and acknowledgement over the Internet using the RosettaNet computer-to-computer processing guidelines.
These guidelines are referred to as Partner Interface Processes, or PIPs. After a number of false starts, the RosettaNet consortium finally issued its first set of ten PIPS - which include the XML-based purchase order and acknowledge electronic document definitions that Intel and Arrow used - just a month or so ago.
Format-neutral XML is widely seen as a replacement for a much older technology called electronic data interchange that wasn't designed for use on the Internet or over the Web.
But RosettaNet has found XML to be an uphill climb from a technical point of view. And just recently RosettaNet's main evangelist, Fadi Chehade, announced his resignation, indicating he will launch a portal for processing XML documents.
Intel vice president of e-business, Sandra Morris, said RosettaNet is looking for a replacement for Chehade, who coordinated the technical work. But despite the ups and down for RosettaNet, the industry group's commitment to XML and an expanding set of PIPS seem undeterred.
To prove that XML-based document exchange can work across vendor boundaries, Arrow Electronics used an XML server from a vendor named Extricity. Intel used a beta version of an XML server product that Sterling Commerce intends to make commercially available next month.
According to Randy Harvey, senior vice president of product development at Sterling Commerce, the Intel and Arrow XML document swap occurred by sending each XML document in a MIME wrapper over HTTP.
Upon receiving it, the XML server converted the document content and sent it to the appropriate back-end system, in Intel's case, its SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning system.
"It works, and over the course of this year we want to roll this out with all our purchasers," Intel's e-business Vice President Sandra Morris says.
Other RosettaNet stalwarts were also out to celebrate "eConcert readiness Day" with their own interoperability demos. 3Com and CompUSA exchanged business documents based on RosettaNet PIPS over the Web, as did Hewlett-Packard and SAP, and Ingram-Micro with CompUSA.
With "eConcert Readiness Day" now past, the question that lies ahead is whether the RosettaNet PIPS are really stable, and can there be mass deployment. The future is still somewhat uncertain, acknowledges Sterling Commerce Senior Vice President Randy Harvey. The RosettaNet consortium is on track for a RosettaNet Implementation 2.0 release later in the spring.
"There will be improvements, but we need to have the feeling that the changes will be subtle, not pervasive," Harvey explained. "We don't want this to turn out to be as slow as EDI was."
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