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What is B2B integration?
Business-to-business (B2B) integration is the automation of business processes and communication between two or more organizations. It allows them to work and trade more effectively with their customers, suppliers and business partners by automating key business processes. B2B integration software provides the architecture needed to digitize information and quickly route it through an organization’s trading ecosystem.
What is a B2B integration platform?
A B2B integration platform helps companies integrate all their complex B2B and electronic data interchange (EDI) processes across their partner communities in a single gateway. The platform collects data from source applications, translates the data into standardized formats and then sends the documents to the business partner using the appropriate transport protocol. B2B integration software is available for on-premises use or integration services can be accessed through hosted cloud services.
Digitalization is pushing partner and customer expectations. Organizations are finding that slow, inefficient, error-prone manual processing of information is not sustainable in a digitally-connected world. And every business has its own mix of systems and applications for exchanging files and messages with partners. Disparate technologies make it difficult to communicate.
To achieve goals like increasing revenue, speeding time to market and improving efficiencies, organizations need a successful business network — and that requires a modern B2B integration solution.1 With the right B2B tools, organizations can digitally connect and communicate quickly and reliably. This can reduce the time it takes to get new products and services to market and help companies achieve the nimbleness and agility they need to compete.
Never say no to an onboarding request. Supports security-rich internet communications protocols, including AS2, SFTP, MQ, HTTP, Connect:Direct and others.
Includes adapters to connect to back-end systems, including databases, SAP as well as cloud object storage with AWS S3 Client Adapter.
Powerful any-to-any transformation. Converts documents from one format to another.
Enables the visualization of data fields and shows the relationships between documents.
Provides event management and reporting, auditing in centralized dashboards that can enable you to extend real-time activity and status information to your system administrators and your partners.
Encrypt data at rest or in motion. Robust certificate management including support of modern ciphers and algorithms.
Applies business rules with graphical business process modeling to the information being sent to identify any errors.
Allows big files to be sent faster. Features include any-size file and message transfer.
Supply chain company tops 29 million transactions in a day
Li & Fung needed to ensure its supply chain management solution could scale to handle exponential spikes in transactions during China’s Singles’ Day sales event. The company worked with IBM Services to test and tune its IBM Sterling B2B Integrator solution, enabling it to process peak volumes of up to one million transactions per hour.
Integrate complex B2B and EDI processes across your partner communities in a single gateway with this highly flexible platform.
Helps automate complex transformation and validation of data between a range of different formats and standards.
Address demands for high-availability operations and redundancy with a robust and reliable data storage solution.
Allows you to consolidate all internet-based file transfers on a single, scalable, security-rich and always-on edge gateway.
Reduce the time and resources required to onboard new partners while managing and maintaining existing partners.
Streamline collaboration across your supply chain by digitizing and automating B2B transactions.
See the results of IDC’s research, which demonstrates the significant business value that IBM clients are achieving with IBM Sterling B2B integration and managed file transfer solutions. (PDF, 1.5 MB)
Learn how IBM clients are realizing business value with the IBM Sterling portfolio, a leader in the B2B data exchange space that enables efficient management of B2B platforms.
Take the IBM Data Exchange Maturity Assessment to see how your company can lower costs and improve efficiency.