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Ecommerce's Monthly Talking Point: June 1999 System Unto System Interoperability standards for ecommerce are coming into the mainstream with recent announcements from Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. Neither company is strongly identified with ecommerce topics, though both are of course formidable industry forces. H-P's e-speak (formerly known as Fremont) is a service glue that allows disparate ecommerce sites to co-operate with each other. It's a way of enabling sites to devolve responsibilities to each other, so that the user doesn't have to negotiate a series of interconnected sites herself. If everyone speaks e-speak - 'the Lingua Franca for eBusiness', as H-P calls it - then the collaborative ecommerce environment will have arrived. Microsoft, in the meantime, have BizTalk. With a less Orwellian ring than e-speak, BizTalk sounds like something vaguely disreputable that goes on in post-Soviet Moscow. But what is it? According to www.biztalk.org:
It's interesting that when we say that English is the Lingua Franca of business, we are actually using a Latin term meaning 'French'. In human commerce, the worn currency of traders' languages becomes central not because it is well designed, but because it has evolved through many transacting generations. BizTalk is somewhat closer to this understanding of trading languages, in that it appears to be aimed at nurturing the development of ecommerce-specific species of XML. And wouldn't you know it, there's a consortium doing something similar called cXML. e-speak is an initiative of a different order altogether. It envisages a world where ecommerce software agents negotiate with each other with some degree of autonomy, as predicted in my paper Reaching for the Wider World of Ecommerce. H-P have stated that e-speak will become open source. In the meantime, we'll be tracking implementations as we learn about them.
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