The technology adoption trend is shifting to a scenario where the customers of a B2B marketplace need interoperability not only with the B2B marketplace, but also with the third-party service providers. Hence the B2B marketplace must be able to offer a single-point source for inter-organizational commerce in a flexible manner.

SOA enabled with Web services shows promise in enabling inter-organizational commerce at reduced cost by leveraging existing investment in legacy systems and thereby increased efficiency for these enterprises. Web services increase flexibility by offering the possibility of creating flexible new business processes from existing IT infrastructure.

A SOA-based architecture which leverages Web services and handles all the functionalities as desired for B2B marketplaces would provide the core service-orientation to B2B marketplaces. SOA enables a flexible B2B marketplace with open interfaces to connect with the customers and partners seamlessly.

The following are some of the benefits for B2B marketplaces in implementing a Web services based architecture:

1. Web services based IT architecture would allow the B2B marketplace to offer its applications as services across its customers and partners allowing for increased flexibility and reuse.

2. Web services would enable the B2B marketplace systems to be compatible with other internal systems without considerable efforts in interfacing.

3. Web services based IT architecture would allow the B2B marketplace to service the requests of its customers regardless of the channels through which they want to access the service (e.g. PDA etc.) and thereby improve customer loyalty.

4. Incorporating semantic matching into the architecture will take care of the common semantic interoperability issues in B2B marketplaces in connecting buyers to sellers.

This article was written by the following authors:

Dr. Jai Ganesh is a Research Associate with the technology research division of Infosys Technologies Limited. He obtained his PhD in information systems from the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) in 2003 and holds an MBA degree in corporate strategy and marketing. His research focuses on Web services, IT strategy and adaptive enterprises.

His research has been published in journals such as Information and Management, Journal of Global Information Management, International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management, etc. and conferences such as AMCIS, ICWS, ICEC, ICEB etc. He serves as a reviewer for a number of peer-reviewed journals and conferences, and has consulted for many software firms.

Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni is a Principal Researcher with the Web Services Centre of Excellence in SETLabs, and specializes in Web services, Service Oriented Architecture, and Grid technologies alongside pursuing interests in semantic web, intelligent agents, and enterprise architecture.

He has authored several papers in international conferences. Prior to Infosys, Dr. Srinivas has worked in multiple capacities in startups out of Canada and USA. Dr. Srinivas holds a PhD degree in computing science from University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. Prior to PhD he secured his B.Tech and M.Tech from Indian Institutes of Technology at Kanpur and Mumbai respectively.