Revolution turns full circle

So who remembers eBIS-XML?

History is littered with the corpses of the next big thing. Many fall prey to the 'build 'em up, knock 'em down' mentality of the media, while others never even get off the ground.

So who remembers eBIS-XML? Was it another pretender to the throne, a sorry tale of hype and humiliation? Or a star that rose quickly but burnt out? This is a story of a technology the world was not ready for in 1999.

Cut to 2002, and there's a quiet revolution going on. The dotcom era created such a wave of hype that, when it crashed dramatically, it was in danger of killing the few real advances it brought with it.

Fortunately, isolated pools of determination remained: the Business Application Software Developers' Association's (BASDA's) standard eBIS-XML was one of them.

Maturing vertical markets such as the house building industry, education and public sector supply have recognised the need to embrace a wider audience along the supply chain rather than work solely with immediate trading partners.

These organisations are putting the theory of collaboration into practice. Of course, there is always a catalyst for mass adoption, and here it comes in the form of the breaking down of technical barriers.

When BASDA designed eBIS-XML, its main mission was to provide electronic trading between standard application packages.

This objective was achieved quickly, but it did not address a key aspect of electronic trading: e-procurement.

Common sense dictates that the supplier must hold stock in an e-procurement relationship, and the customer controls spending levels.

The level of replication required to converge these requirements was impractical.

The solution was pioneered by Salford University. It concluded that there was no point in trying to move the place where key data and business rules were held.

Instead it glued the processes together using a common standard, so they talked to each other co-operatively. This solves the major issues without re-engineering.

EBIS-XML offers thousands of similar solutions for problematic applications, and these are now coming to light across the sectors in which it has been adopted.

This means the quiet revolution is set to generate more noise, as vertical markets become converts of electronic trading.

Edward Loigorri is managing director of Exchequer Software.