An emerging collection of technical standards promises to change forever the way marketers do their jobs by automating how businesses interact.
The question is: Will this automation cut marketers out of the mix?
One of the most recent and important proposed standards is called universal description, discovery and integration. UDDI, based on XML, seeks to set a standard way for e-businesses to define themselves on the Internet. The service uses a White/Yellow Pages metaphor under the belief that each business defines its own listings to help other businesses search for them.
For some, the danger for e-marketers in specifications like UDDI is that all their branding and marketing work gets lost in the translation, as the next generation of e-commerce devolves into machines talking to machines and automatically enabling transactions.
UDDI proponents, for their part, say the specification aims not to override traditional marketing efforts but instead provide a basic infrastructure, on top of which future business-to-business marketing initiatives will ride. They compare UDDI with the Web’s domain name service-the underlying technology that translates Internet protocol addresses into familiar domain names, such as www.rcrnews.com.
“The fact that Ford has registered Ford.com isn’t the end of their marketing efforts. It’s the beginning,” said Boris Putanec, Ariba Inc.’s vice president of corporate strategy.
DNS enables the Web to work in a very basic way. On top of DNS is an entire infrastructure of Web sites, search engines and other services that actually make up the World Wide Web.
In the same way, the so-called “business Web” will rely on UDDI to make basic connections, but a whole range of search engines, e-marketplaces, aggregators and other new business models will emerge on top of this infrastructure to help businesses connect with other businesses, Putanek predicted.
Putanek said “there will be an art to listing your company” in the UDDI database, but it will represent just the tip of business-to-business marketing efforts.
Indeed, business-to-business e-commerce would be significantly crippled without something like UDDI, said Gartner Group Inc. analyst Daryl Plummer. “Where multiple businesses and multiple marketplaces are trying to interact, a mechanism to locate software services and share those services must exist,” he said.
“Two years from now, we’ll look back on this day and say this was the event and alliance that kicked off the ability of businesses anywhere in the world to move their businesses to the Internet,” said Larry Mueller, Ariba president and chief operating officer at the media event announcing the agreement. “Until we can come to a common set of standards, we will deal with confusion in the marketplace.”
The UDDI initiative comes amid efforts at defining XML-based standards to grease the business-to-business tracks.
Last week, for example, a group of companies defining ebXML, a project to standardize the exchange of electronic business data, said it had created a team to standardize electronic contracts and trading partnerships using XML.
The ebXML group is a joint initiative of the United Nations and Oasis, an XML standards body that aims to define so-called TPAs, or trading partner profiles, and agreements. TPAs move beyond mere supplier look-up and define detailed technical parameters necessary for two companies to conduct transactions over the Internet.
Since IBM Corp. provided much of the early work on TPAs, the project may intersect with UDDI at some point.
A consolidation of XML standards would be welcome. Despite XML’s promise of simplifying electronic conversations between businesses, a number of XML “standards” are only standard in name.
For instance, both Ariba and Commerce One Inc. have used XML to create a method for describing products in their procurement catalogs. But the two company’s methods are still incompatible.
In contrast, there seems to be broad industry backing of UDDI.
Ariba, along with IBM and Microsoft Corp., proposed the UDDI standard and will be the first to roll out UDDI-supporting databases. According to the companies, the databases will be ready within 30 days.
But a total of 36 companies, including Ariba competitor Commerce One and a slew of other vendors and e-marketplace operators, signed on to back the venture.
Commerce One, which plans this week to announce a major content and catalog strategy that will have it hosting multimillion SKU catalogs around the globe, said it will add UDDI as soon as it can.
Finally, in recent weeks activity among e-marketplaces has picked up in defining XML-based b-to-b standards for various industries.
For instance, in late August e-marketplace SellMeat.com said it was defining meatXML, a standard language for the meat and poultry industry. Jae Cha, chief technology officer SellMeat.com, called it the “first step in creating a common language to use for e-commerce” in his industry.
Also last month, chemicals marketplace Envera, which is owned by chemical and oil giants including The BFGoodrich Co., Eastman Chemical Co. and Sunoco Corp., proposed a set of XML tags to standardize business-to-business trading among companies in that industry.
The idea behind these and other vertical industry XML standards is to help companies define a set way to conduct e-business with one another via the Internet.
What remains to be seen is whether all these XML standards, and other emerging e-business practices from the exploding world of e-marketplaces, will work together or create confusion.
Backers of the UDDI standard hope they have defined a broad standard that will serve business-to-business as well as DNS, HTTP and HTML have served the Web in general.
“With UDDI you have a standard way of interrogating the system to understand what business a [potential partner] is in and what services they might provide,” said Paul Martiz, group vice president at Microsoft. “It lets you extend the net of who you can trade with more broadly.”
Richard Karpinski is a reporter with Crain’s B-to-B, a sister publication of RCR Wireless News.
