Marketplace Architecture for Enterprise Integration

Abstract

Businesses today must be fast and flexible, responsive to customers, and cost effective in their operations. They must collaborate more frequently with partners to build virtual organizations and supply-chains that reduce times-to-market and costs. E-business is the use of the Internet along with other electronic means and technologies to conduct within-business, business-to-consumer, business-to-business, and business-to-government interactions. A basic model of an e-business is the e-shop model, which is based on providing a self-service storefront to a customer by displaying the company catalogs and product offers on a Web site. An e-procurement model focuses on the buying aspect of the business. A typical architecture for e-procurement consists of a browser-based self-service front-end to the corporate purchasing system or its ERP. The supplier catalogs are presented to end-users through a single unified catalog, thereby facilitating a corporate-wide standard procurement process. Online auction models have also received much attention for automating dynamic trading. Other models are based on creating value-chain businesses, such as service provisioning of specific functions for the value-chain, and electronic payments or logistics.