The Benefits of Integrating via a B2B Cloud

The concept of Cloud Computing is well understood, but less so in a B2B environment, especially in a B2B and SAP context where there is a significant potential cost saving opportunity for many companies. Cloud Computing in a B2B environment offers the means to provision a constantly up-to-date B2B infrastructure at a fraction of the cost that an individual organisation could do themselves. It offers the potential of a range of value-added services that can drive efficiency through all aspects of your B2B and SAP operations.

B2B Managed Services providers utilise a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to quickly and cost-effectively create innovative B2B applications that they can ‘rent’ on-demand to organisations who are looking to maximise connectivity with their trading partner community.

Key benefits of using a B2B Cloud include:

• No development or maintenance of a B2B infrastructure
• The B2B infrastructure is always based on the latest standards and technologies
• No need for direct point-to-point connection with your trading partners
• Trading partner profiles are maintained externally
• Performance and support is backed by solid SLAs
• No software license costs
• Only pay for what you use
• Scalable capacity as required

By using a B2B Cloud, you take advantage of SOA for B2B application development based around shared and reusable components. Services can range from identity, context and accounting to document translation, protocol mediation and data quality. These are all based on common content repositories, which contain trading partner profiles and configurable business rules. Importantly, these services are held externally to your SAP system ensuring the highest level of data quality and maintaining your trading partner relationships without point-to-point connection.

Components can be quickly and easily updated to reflect any required change without affecting your B2B infrastructure performance or your SAP system.

40% of the world’s B2B data traffic already passes through a B2B Cloud – GXS Trading Grid

GXS Trading Grid is an example of a specialised B2B cloud.  The Trading Grid platform supports hundreds of open standards ranging from communications protocols to messaging standards and business processes. On top of this foundation are a series of SOA business service APIs that make it easier to build and operate B2B systems. Most B2B integration today is done with these tools and services. The result is a reliable and secure B2B infrastructure with the flexibility and scalability to respond quickly to your business challenges – with you only paying for the services that you actually consume.

GXS Trading Grid: the B2B Cloud from GXS

GXS has invested more than £400 million to create a high performance, highly secure B2B Cloud computing platform, that includes:

• Modular blade servers, storage area networks, and a high capacity, intra-data center WAN
• Fully redundant data storage and operations between GXS data centres
• 99.95% service availability
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based application provision
• A comprehensive range of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications covering areas such as product and price management, supply chain visibility, and invoices and payments
• 24/7, multi-lingual support coverage
• Fully SAP NetWeaver certified

Find out more about the cloud computing capabilities of GXS.