Enabling Cross-Organizational Interoperability: A Hybrid e-Business Architecture

Abstract

The number of enterprises that automate business transactions is constantly growing. Renowned scientists such as Malone cite the relentless march of improvements in the cost-performance ratio of information technology as main driver of this recent development. Benefits of performing transactions electronically include extending market reach, saving time, cutting costs and responding to customer queries agilely. However, significant hurdles must be taken to successfully deploy and operate e-Business solutions: Substantially different standards prevent from a common understanding of both business processes and exchanged data and high cost and complexity of existing solutions impede fast adoption by potential users. In this work, we elaborate on different e-Business architectures that are readily available to businesses and can be considered as either merely Peer-to-Peer (P2P) or server based. Subsequently, we present a novel system that follows a hybrid approach and adheres to principles from both P2P and centrally oriented solutions.