By Chris Gonsalves

March 6, 2007 - No business is an island. Enterprises dedicated to growth through new projects and better business processes must now focus beyond their own systems and find ways to connect with a burgeoning network of trading partners. But while giving partners the keys to the IT kingdom can speed transactions and put new business initiatives on the fast track, adding authorized users to the network also exposes security, scalability and management soft spots.

In order to get past expensive and time-consuming custom connections, businesses most often seek scalability with B2B integration platforms that offer one shared interface and repeatable processes that can be applied to large numbers of trading partners. And now, with the addition of identity management to the B2B integration infrastructure landscape, IT finally has a complete set of tools to build and maintain truly secure, effective, efficient partner networks. With identity management as part of the B2B integration equation from the onset of a project, users can bring hundreds of thousands of trading partners on board, getting them certified and connected to a production network rapidly and easily.

The First of Its Kind

How It Works - Sun identity-enabled B2B integration streamlines the processes associated with establishing and managing relationships with trading partners, enables compete transaction visibility across the enterprise and extranet, and provides auditing capabilities.

Identity-Enabled B2B integration combines Sun's comprehensive B2B Suite 2.0 with our market-leading identity management software. The combination--a first for the industry--represents a powerful shift toward extending Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) out to trading partners and incorporating identity management into the overall auditing, provisioning, and management of trading partner networks. It allows large numbers of partners on a secure network to access data from both legacy and composite applications. With the Identity-Enabled B2B integration, enterprises get a streamlined view into all of their trading relationships through a central repository, dramatically reducing the operational burden of managing large numbers of online trading partners. Moreover, the powerful controls and monitoring tools built into the Sun's Identity-Enabled B2B solution offer an enhanced ability to examine trading partner transactions and mine data that can be used to improve business processes with no additional development required.

Speed and Automate Transactions

More than just a gateway, the Sun integration platform offers a true SOA-based methodology that speeds integration of new applications by allowing for the reuse of trading elements such as document formats, object types and integration interfaces. The BPEL-based business process engine lets users extend services into shared business processes. For example, trading-partner message validation services and message processing and error-handling components become reusable infrastructure assets not only improving speed and consistency of partner transactions, but also bolstering scalability.

This release comes at a particularly opportune time for businesses who have, for the past decade, been wrestling first with internal application integration and, more recently, with partner communications.

"Over the past ten years large companies have been busily integrating inside their own four walls, as well as integrating legacy applications with newer applications," says John Hardin, B2B Product Manager, SOA/Business Integration, at Sun Microsystems. "Generally the trend has been toward automating processes within their organization first. They are pulling the paperwork out of all their processes."

These internal integration projects coupled with other current business drivers—globalization, mergers and acquisitions, increased specialization—have led enterprise IT to look for ways to speed and automate transactions with trading partners. "The reality is that every company today relies on other companies to either feed it materials and information or they need to provide other companies with materials and information," Hardin points out. "It's all about improving processes and improving efficiency in communication between all partners."

Strong Support for Standards

The suite includes support for all major operating systems including Solaris OS and all major industry-specific and cross industry standards including EDI, OAGIS, UBL, ebXML, xCBL, HIPAA, AIAG, CIDX, and RosettaNet.

Scattered and disparate security mechanisms are corralled onto an LDAP-based directory server for secure storage of trading-partner profiles and an Access Control List to ensure audit controls are consistently enforced and evaluated. Combining Sun Identity Management and B2B Suite 2.0 gives strong support for message encryption, identity synchronization, and digital certificates, helping to lower the risks inherent in offering network access to outside users. Users can rest assured that both sender and recipient identities are authenticated, and that documents are not altered in transit.

The Best of Both Worlds

It's clear that emerging business processes will continue to put the onus on IT to improve interactions with trading partners and to architect and deploy robust B2B integration infrastructures. Sun's Identity-Enabled B2B integration solution brings order to often chaotic B2B integration projects by providing both the integration and the identity-management tools needed to design and deliver secure, large-scale partner networks.

"It's the best of both worlds," Hardin says. "We have extremely powerful B2B integration and when we combine that with identity management, it's a big win."