webMethods B2B overview
webMethods B2B is IBM®'s secure, format-neutral, business-document gateway that recognizes and processes documents that are exchanged between partners.
Through webMethods B2B, you can exchange business documents with the partners in your network to relay production information.
You can create a B2B network on webMethods B2B, which is a group of organizations that agreed to exchange business documents. Participant organizations might include strategic partners, buyers, suppliers, and marketplaces (for example, Ariba Network). These participant organizations are referred to as partners.
Business documents that partners exchange include purchase orders, order statuses, purchase order acknowledgments, invoices, and other domain-specific documents. webMethods B2B enables your corporation to connect to other organizations to form a business-to-business (B2B) network.
webMethods B2B does not require that all partners in the network use webMethods B2B or IBM webMethods software. Each of your partners can use their own software to communicate with your instance of webMethods B2B. If you have buyers, suppliers, or strategic partners who use other software, you can add them to your network by creating partner profiles for each of them. Partner profiles contain information about how to connect to the partners and share information.
In the following figure, the partner in the center is referred to as the hub of the network or the enterprise partner. The other partners are referred to as spokes. The hub hosts the network and the spokes participate by interacting with the hub. A partner does not have to be exclusively a hub or a spoke, it can be both. It can be a hub of its own network and a spoke in another partner's network.
webMethods B2B satisfies the following business needs:
- Complete lifecycle management of business documents.
- Complete monitoring and tracking of a single transaction in an orchestrated environment.
Lifecycle of B2B assets
The assets that you create on webMethods B2B are referred to as B2B assets. These assets undergo transitions in a specific manner as depicted in the following image.
