5.2 ebXML Problems

A major goal of ebXML was to enable Small to Medium Enterprises to become part of the global electronic marketplace. As Rawlins points out at http://www.rawlinsecconsulting.com a major problem lies in the integration of the ebXML Business Service Interface within the enterprise business applications. It is important to notice, that ebXML is business process based where a business process has several states. The business applications of Small to Medium Enterprises will have difficulty to integrate the ebXML Business Service Interface. Further some business processes are truly industry specific and those will have problems to integrate them with their low end ERP systems because the low end ERP system vendors are less likely to implement ebXML. Further concrete problems are:

• There is no formal description on how to derive a CPA from two CPP's. The ebXML specification states that this process may not be 100% automated and human interaction may be necessary.
• There are no concrete conversion rules for UML to XML provided by ebXML.
• There is a problem of how to find a Registry/Repository. It seems that there will be many different Registries/Repositories for different industries. The usage of UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration ¹⁴) can be a solution to this problem.
• Companies cannot start using ebXML yet because the Registry/Repository is still empty. It needs time to get the Core Components stored in the Core Library (Registry/Repository), then to create the Business Information Objects which are needed for the Business Documents. It needs time to create Common Business Processes and store them in the Business Library (Registry/Repository). The UBL (Universal Business Language) team is at the work to create the Core Components defined in XML.
• Today's business applications are not ebXML ready yet. This is especially true for software applications of the Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) market. It needs time until these software packages integrate ebXML and allow the SME's to do ebXML business transparently. Software companies commited their will to start the integration of ebXML within their products.

The time will come and the problems will be addressed or are already underway to be solved. ebXML needs time to evolve and to provide a solid solution for a global electronic marketplace to allow inter-enterprise businesses.

Footnotes

... Integration¹⁴

http://www.uddi.org