When you get right down to it, e-business is a simple concept. An e-business is an organization that connects critical business systems directly to key actors such as customers, employees, suppliers, and distributors, by using Internet technology. But this simple concept quickly becomes powerful. As customers, employees, suppliers and distributors are all connected to the business systems and information they need, e-business actually transforms key business processes. This book intends to present the emergence, and the impacts of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) in e-business world.
By reading this book, customers, IBM sales people, IT architects, and IT specialists will have the opportunity to understand how the “marriage” between XML technology and the IBM Application Framework for e-business can help to leverage e-business applications, particularly those based on business-to-business (B2B), and business-to-consumer (B2C) models.
In writing this book, residents had many discussions with IBM people involved in e-business, XML, and related technologies. They also “surfed the net” (IBM and non-IBM) to gather information about the e-business world in general, the IBM e-business vision and solution, and the XML technology applied to the e-business applications.
This book is designed to expand your knowledge on the following topics:
- The e-business market: what is going on, trends, and directions.
- The added value of XML technology to help to solve issues, and some challenges that arise through e-business applications such as data exchange, portal services, and pervasive device support.
- How IBM cuts XML and related technologies down to size in its application Framework for e-business, including details of the IBM offering in terms of architecture and tools to design, develop, deploy, and run complex B2B models (applications sharing services among different trading partners), and B2C models (applications providing end-users with various services).
This book also depicts a case study in the eMarketPlace field that demonstrates the ability of XML technology combined with the IBM Application Framework for e-business to implement both B2B and B2C models.