April 18, 2002, Stockholm, Sweden
The OBI (Open
Buying on the Internet) standard was created 1996 but have in its original form
so far only been moderately successful. A part of the problem has been
limited interoperability, an OBI-specific client security-solution, as well as a
lack of extensibility.
Therefore late 2001, an effort was initiated, set
to move OBI into the 21st century, by "cloning" the simple, but yet brilliant
(and much copied) OBI-method of transferring business data between the buying
and selling sites through the user's browser, with the emerging Web Services
standards. The enhanced OBI standard has been renamed to OBI Express, as
it is more than just a revision, it is rather a total redesign.
A novel
feature of OBI Express, called "Web Services Discovery", only requires a single
URL to find out and exploit the e-commerce capabilities of a business
partner. This eliminates the reliance on external e-services currently
only in pilot stage like UDDI or ebXML-registries, as a company's "e-commerce
URL" can equally well be published on their home-page, be sent with e-mail, be
printed on paper, or even be given over the phone.
By the addition of
other key-technologies like XML-schemas and XML-signatures, as well as
authentication techniques similar to OASIS's SAML, OBI Express easily and
securely allow business parties to "connect" in a truly many-to-many,
plug-and-play fashion.
To facilitate completely distributed
user-administration, as well as not imposing particular requirements on
client-security solutions, OBI Express was designed from the ground-up using
organization-level, server-based PKI.
Fully exploring the seller-centric
OBI model, OBI Express enables ordering of customized products of any complexity
like computers and airline tickets, without requiring purchasing systems, to
actually "understand" these.
The net effect of those enhancements, makes
OBI Express suited also for extremely cost-sensitive ASP-operations like
Internet-banks, where the current payment functionality can be augmented with a
"purchasing account", making true B2B-purchasing (Sign-on, Orders, Invoices,
Quotes etc.) within reach for companies of any size.
Although in an early
stage, major Nordic banks are currently evaluating OBI Express as an add-on
service for their SME-customers.
A public Proof-of-Concept system is
currently available for evaluation
at URL https://buyer.x-obi.com/BuyerASP/buyer
Anders
Rundgren
OBI Express project manager
+46 70 - 627 74 37
Trademarks:
OBI and OBI Express are trademarks of
CommerceNet