Network World, 01/04/99

As the new millennium dawns, large corporations, which for more than a decade have structured business-to-business e-commerce activities around the older electronic data interchange (EDI) technology, will more and more be exploring Web-based applications to accommodate their smallest trading partners. These small companies can't afford EDI or cope with its technical demands. There are already signs that format-dependent EDI eventually is going to be upstaged by the format-neutral XML, which provides greater ease in data collection and online catalog searches.

The Open Buying on the Internet (OBI) Consortium, the group of powerhouse vendors and users that has been slowly building an industry standard for exchanging EDI-based purchase orders and acknowledgments over the Web, seems likely to chart a new course toward XML.

Another evolving e-commerce issue is taxation. In the U.S., an advisory committee composed of state, federal and business representatives will sit down this year to hammer out new rules for taxing goods and services on the Internet - if they decide uniform taxes should apply at all.

Finally, last year we predicted 1998 would be the year the 'Net credit card processing standard called Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) finally gets off the ground. Well, we were only half right (or half wrong, if you aren't as charitable). The first generation of SET wallets, commerce servers and bank Internet gateways has been deployed in Europe and the Far East, but interest in SET has been slow among U.S. banks.

The slow adoption of SET in the U.S. is not likely to change overnight, but banks haven't given up on the standard. The adoption of this Web credit card standard will come this year, but slowly.

Prediction: XML-based document-management and e-commerce servers will get a chance to start proving their worth in an uphill battle against older, established technologies such as EDI and HTML. But don't expect a stampede to XML until this new breed of product gets a thorough inspection from users, and the inevitable product "upgrades" are made as the XML standards suite matures.