What is be (business entity)

At the beginning of the third millennium, we are facing one of the most important transition challenges: to build an electronic society. In that movement, EC (Electronic Commerce) represents one of the major driving forces that survived two big failures in the past, represented by EDI (1980s) and “dotcom era” (1990s). Despite different network technologies, EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) over OSI (Open Systems Interconnections) vs. dotcom over the Internet both left out of the e-business too many companies (e.g. most of SMEs, Small-to-Medium Enterprises). After disillusionment and failure analysis, new expansion of EC is taking place, especially in the form of B2B. In such circumstances there is a lot of heterogeneity between business processes, supported applications and associated data on one side and different hardware, operating systems, database systems, network infrastructure, etc. on the other side, that make huge difficulties and barriers in achieving the full potential of EC (Medjahed et al., 2003; Kajan & Stoimenov, 2005; Hepp, 2006). Similar situation is taking place inside companies where A2A (Application-to-Application) costs for data integration and access software were about $2.5 billion in 2007 and are going to grow further (Bernstein & Hass, 2008).