A study and implementation of business-to-business e-commerce with the OBI standard

Internet based e-commerce has flourished in the business-to-consumer world. The lack of well-accepted standards is hindering the success in providing business-to-business e-commerce solutions. Open Buying on the Internet, or OBI, standard is one of the recent efforts in bringing business-to-business e-commerce into corporate purchasing. OBI is a common standard, based on the existing industry standards, that guides trading partners in implementing interoperable purchasing systems on the Internet. In this paper, we present a field study project on how companies may use OBI. We also survey the additional desirable services expected from managers who may use OBI-based e-commerce systems. We then describe a prototype implementation to enable the OBI capability in the IBM Net.Commerce merchant server software. With our implementation, existing merchant servers can be easily augmented to adopt the OBI standard for business-to-business e-commerce. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.