Presentation at ASUG08: How to Accelerate Your B2B...

gunther_stuhec · ‎04-01-2008

High Costs of Integration at Current B2B

Although the concept of B2B and the exchange of electronic data is not new, and although billions of dollars have been spent in its pursuit, true B2B and data integration remains an elusive target for many. Even the limited B2B implemented by the exclusive club of big companies is costly, time consuming, limited in scope, and inefficient.

Why? Because the high cost of integration dictates that initiatives are necessarily limited by engagements where profitability can be proven. These costs include:

Too many available B2B standards
Too complex business data structures
Too many individual developments, modifications and isolated solutions of business data models
Too many domain specific requirements
Too much focus on technical aspects such as XML and not on the common representation of business semantics

Unless these limitations and barriers can be overcome, the evolution of an internet based supply chain management system will never be realized.

Lack of revolutionary B2B integration solutions

Although prohibitive, these limitations and barriers pale in significance to another, more formidable barrier that prevents true business network transformation. That barrier is the lack of a revolutionary solution to achieving efficient multi-enterprise B2B integration and interoperability environment through semantic driven data integration, data modeling, and automatic data mapping.

Current B2B integration solutions primarily focus on labor intensive manual mapping of one B2B interface to another B2B interface. Each mapping is defined individually and requires significant time and expense. These mapping efforts, though costly and time consuming, are really the end result, not the root of the problem. The real root to interoperability barriers springs from the current approach to the conceptualization and development of business data models and B2B interfaces.

How can we solve this? A successful B2B integration solution must consider all aspects of integration: business analysis, business specific conceptualization, business data modeling, consolidation and harmonization, mappings, and technical integration into the business application. Unfortunately, the marketplace is barren in this regard - existing tools are limited, only specialize in data modeling or data integration or data mapping, are not based in end-to-end semantic driven solutions, require a high learning curve, are typically single user applications, and demand highly qualified and expensive experts to have any level of effectiveness.

CCTS Modeler Warp 10 will change the paradigm

Fortunately, there is good news on the horizon. SAP is creating the CCTS Modeler Warp 10 to address all of these issues. Warp 10 is a fully integrated, all in one tool for business data modeling and B2B integration. Warp 10 provides a semantic oriented methodology wherein business experts can discover and describe their requirements. At its core is its wiki-approach wherein a community of users can collaboratively develop and customize business data models.

Warp 10 contains an ontology-based repository that provides semantic based suggestions which can be directly reused for the user’s unique business requirements. The suggestions are generated through its semi-automatic mapping approach. This semi-automatic mapping approach and the underlying reference ontology is based on a set of open standards driven, semantic based, common methodology standards. SAP uses these common methodology standards to create its own Global Data Types (GDTs), Business Objects, and Service Definitions. These common methodology standards are also being adopted by a number of leading Standards Development Organizations to define their own B2B standards.

Warp 10 maps all existing B2B standards against the reference ontology, thus creating a rich library of readily available mappings that facilitates the collaborative modeling of business data. This evolutionary approach enables the user to readily determine what information is essential, and what information is unnecessary for a particular business exchange. Over time, this reference ontology and their underlying SAP GDTs will become the language of business by eliminating the need for future mappings since it readily provides the meaning of business data models based on a common business language grammar.

Warp 10 has been designed with a Web 3.0 approach that focuses on intuitive based ease of use features that are easily understood and readily usable by anyone. It does not require extensive user training. Deploying Warp 10 will enable significantly faster integration and business collaboration through its 20X acceleration of complete modeling and integration efforts.

Warp 10 at ASUG08

Seem hard to believe? Let me prove it to you. Please come to the presentation "Significant Acceleration of Integration Between Applications and of B2B" at the ASUG08 Annual Conference on May 5^th. I will demonstrate Warp 10, its capabilities and its revolutionary approach.

You can find more information at the following link:

http://www.sapphire2008agenda.com/usa2008/sessiondetails.epx?sessionid=14915&agendaitemtype=2&keynot...