"There's wind, and then there's a typhoon. In this business, you always have winds. But a 10X force is a change in an element of one's business—a typhoon. Is the Internet a typhoon, or a bit of wind? Is it a force that fundamentally alters our business?"
—Andrew Grove, Chairman and founder, IntelebXML is an emerging e-commerce standard that leverages the flexibility of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to build e-commerce infrastructure. XML is a markup language used to create data and documents for application communications and storage. The "eb" in ebXML stands for "electronic business," and the phrase is pronounced as simply "ee-bee-ex-em-el." In this book we will discuss how ebXML fundamentally changes the way information technology (IT) handles online business transactions.
The ebXML standard is the result of a joint international initiative of the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). ebXML is a concerted effort to combine the best of two existing standards: electronic data interchange (EDI) and extensible markup language (XML). Prior to ebXML, members of both EDI and XML groups disagreed over details but wanted something from the other side. XML users wanted access to the EDI community's vast inventory of business semantics and standards development, and the EDI community wanted to use XML technology. Joining forces in the ebXML initiative was a win-win situation. Together they set the following goal, according to the published ebXML vision on the organization's Web site:"The vision of ebXML is to enable a global electronic marketplace where enterprises of any size and in any geographical location can meet and conduct business with each other through the exchange of XML-based messages."
