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BizDex: ebXML and Web services to go the last mile
The Australian government has combined with standards authorities and technology vendors to build a national e-business network for small companies.
For years, if not decades, e-business enthusiasts have struggled with getting small businesses to willingly adopt collaborative e-business practices. In Australia, a project call BizDex aims to accomplish that feat using Web services and ebXML.
Australia's National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE), a government agency, joined with Standards Australia to develop BizDex as a national interoperability framework. In this scheme, the public/private partnership provides the central authority needed to identify and enforce standards, while the private sector provides the entrepreneurial energy and creativity to fashion solutions. As a result, BizDex anticipates reaching a large enough scale to make it economically attractive for vendors to enter this market. At the same time, those same economies of scale should make the e-business solutions inexpensive for the small business users.
The BizDex project is unique in other respects. Unlike earlier voluntary e-business initiatives, BizDex is designed as something of a business itself, with a plan for generating revenues. And unlike most similar efforts, BizDex involves a leading small-business software vendor to deliver e-business over that last mile to the shops, stores, and services that need it.
The BizDex architecture
BizDex provides a common framework for e-business interactions and integration in Australia. It offers common specifications for public processes – those generally going between companies or organizations – and internal operations, what it calls private processes. While most e-business standards efforts, including ebXML, have focused on the public processes, the job of integrating e-business data into a company's internal operations has often stymied small business adoption of these standards. Traditional hub-and-spoke models, like those used with EDI, may force small businesses to use e-business technologies, but they have little incentive beyond keeping a good customer happy to make full use of those technologies.
The heart of BizDex is a registry based on UDDI. The registry provides the discovery functions, capturing white page (identification) and yellow page (classification) data in a common format. The registry also provides the technical implementation details, in the form of UDDI tModels, with separate tModels for public and private (internal company) processes. BizDex envisions using UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM) to generate a set of WSDL, BPEL, and WS-Policy files to populate the public tModels. BPEL orchestrations would also contribute to the private processes, supported by X-Forms, XML schemas and XSLT stylesheets.
The use of ebXML in BizDex, not surprisingly, is with the public processes. BizDex uses Collaboration Protocol Agreements (CPAs) to drive the run-time message handlers. According to Steve Capell of RedWahoo, one of the companies building BizDex, the registry metadata will generate the CPAs rather than combining two Collaboration Protocol Profiles as recommended in the ebXML specifications. The ebXML Message Service provides the messaging functions in BizDex. For message security, Australia has defined and BizDex uses a special PKI implementation as its e-business trust specification.
In BizDex, as shown in the chart, the UMM models will outline the overall processes that drive the WSDL, BPEL, and WS-Policy artifacts, as well as the CPAs making up the trading partner agreements. WSDL outputs will describe the business-to-business processes on the public side of the UDDI registries, specifically portType, binding, and reference tModels. At the same time, WSDL outputs will feed BPEL artifacts to describe internal processes and orchestrations, populating the orchestration tModels in the private side of the UDDI registries. Another set of tModels will represent X-Forms, XML schemas and XSLT stylesheets that support the private processes. Other BPEL and WS-Policy artifacts will describe the abstract processes that link the WSDL activities and (in the case of WS-Policy) describe quality of service attributes.
Figure 1, BizDex Architecture
Click on thumbnail for the full-size image
In the BizDex scheme, the UDDI tModels for both the public and private processes will then contribute to the UDDI business profile, made up of BusinessEntity, BusinessService, and bindingTemplate components. Trading partners can then use these business profiles to build trading partner agreements, made up of WS-Policy or ebXML/CPA components. The trading partner agreements, in turn, can define the runtime configurations for ebXML message handlers or other non-XML protocols such as AS2.
Business support and a revenue-based business model
BizDex's definition and support of private processes offer the internal integration needed to help make the scheme work for small businesses. By defining these processes in advance and providing a library of standard Web forms and integration components in a separate facility (called BizLink), the Australians hope to encourage small business systems vendors to enter the e-business market. BizDex has already secured the support of Intuit, the makers of Quicken home and small-business accounting software, as well as Microsoft. The support of these two important vendors makes the BizDex project worth watching.
NOIE and Standards Australia organized BizDex as a public-private partnership. Its backers claim BizDex provides the structure and stability of a public service, combined with the entrepreneurial energy of the private sector. The public side of the partnership concentrates on development of standards and public processes. As part of the project, BizDex plans to offer fee-based services for the integration components or adapters to connect the public processes to individual business systems. However, companies would pay for the integration services as they are used, relieving the user companies of a large upfront investment. BizDex will provide other fee-based services, such as trading partner agreements and management of trading partner communities. According to the plan for BizDex, these fee-based services would cover the costs of the free registration and trading-partner discovery functions.
BizDex has already landed support from Australia's large wheat-growing sector, which has committed to using BizDex. The Australian Wheat Board (AWB) plans to use BizDex to better manage its wheat inventories and reduce supply chain costs. In a December presentation, Tony Clement, AWB's general manager for e-business, said the industry could save AUD 20-30 million per year from greater inventory transparency and improved supply chain management.
As of December 2003, BizDex completed a proof of concept test and has started building the production infrastructure, with start up planned for the second quarter of 2004. During this same period, BizDex plans to begin populating its standards library, as part of a parallel project called BizLib that supports the public processes used in the project.
Combining resources and technologies
The BizDex approach, if successful, would offer some important lessons for e-business development. First, it combines the resources of the public and private sectors. In Australia, the NOIE considers e-business a high enough priority to take an active role in guiding development of the basic e-business infrastructure. This involvement of the public sector contradicts the conventional wisdom that frowns on having government pick technological winners and losers. If, however, e-business is considered important to improving productivity across the economy (Note that AWB already anticipates large savings from BizDex.), then government may need to step in when vendor companies themselves cannot settle their standards disputes.
Second, BizDex expects that Web services and ebXML can work together in the overall structure. Since BizDex addresses both public and private processes, it needs to reach into both bags of technologies to fashion a solution. Companies and organizations who continue to promote a narrow us-vs-them line about these standards are doing a disservice to their customers and ultimately themselves. If the BizDex project works, it will help bury that myth.
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