DALLAS, May 24, 1999 — Building on a two-year strategic alliance, Microsoft Corp. and Commerce One® Inc., a leading provider of electronic commerce solutions, today announced a broad collaboration around the BizTalk TM Framework and XML technologies to accelerate business-to-business electronic commerce by enabling greater interoperability between trading partners. As part of today’s news, delivered at Microsoft’s Tech · Ed 99 conference, the Common Business Library (CBL), a public collection of XML document building blocks developed by Commerce One, and the Commerce One MarketSite TM based business documents will be submitted into the BizTalk.Org schema repository. During today’s executive keynote at Tech · Ed 99, the Commerce Chain TM Solution by Commerce One, a leading electronic procurement solution, was demonstrated using CBL and BizTalk Framework schemas .
In addition, the Commerce Chain Solution by Commerce One will support the BizTalk Framework. As a result, Microsoft’s and Commerce One’s customers and trading partners will be able to easily exchange business documents and integrate diverse e-commerce applications, making it easier for greater numbers of buying and selling organizations to participate in the Commerce One MarketSite.
This interoperability between Commerce One and the BizTalk Framework will help customers avoid the high costs of custom integration and support for multiple document standards when establishing e-commerce relationships with trading partners. The Commerce One MarketSite open marketplace platform will support any business document included in the BizTalk.Org repository, in addition to CBL-based documents. As a result, all BizTalk-enabled applications can interoperate with any MarketSite business-to-business marketplace portal, including Commerce One MarketSite.net in North America.
“We believe this collaboration with Microsoft will greatly expand participation in MarketSite.net and other MarketSite trading communities around the world, creating economies of scale for Commerce One customers and their trading partners,”
said Chuck Donchess, vice president of Marketing and Business Development for Commerce One.
“Web-based marketplaces and trading communities based on nonproprietary XML environments, such as CBL, are critical to reducing the barriers to entry for all trading partners and driving maximum value to members of the marketplace.”
Commerce One is also a charter member of the BizTalk steering committee, a group of organizations that guides the development and direction of the BizTalk Framework and manages BizTalk.Org. (More information about the BizTalk steering committee can be found at http://www.biztalk.org/ .)
“This collaboration expands our long-standing strategic relationship with Commerce One,”
said Paul Maritz, group vice president of Microsoft’s Developer Group.
“Leveraging Commerce One’s XML expertise and its Common Business Library will greatly accelerate adoption of electronic commerce by providing essential XML building blocks that can be used by all BizTalk supporters to create and translate their business documents.”
To accelerate the process of developing BizTalk Framework schemas, Commerce One MarketSite and CBL will support XML-Data Reduced (XDR), the current syntax used for the BizTalk Framework, in addition to Schema for Object Oriented XML (SOX). XDR and SOX are XML-based schema languages that have been submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and will support the W3C schema specification when it becomes widely available. Both languages provide the rich software data representations needed to classify, search, validate, map and dynamically interpret e-commerce business documents. E-commerce applications that support XDR and SOX will be able to use BizTalk Framework schemas to develop trading relationships with any organization that supports schema from the BizTalk.Org repository.
“We strongly believe that a common business language is critical to e-commerce interoperability,”
said Randy Whiting, president and CEO of CommerceNet, an industry consortium for companies using, promoting and building electronic commerce solutions on the Internet.
“CommerceNet selected Commerce One CBL as the foundation for our XML interoperability framework, based on CBL’s broad horizontal scope and careful analysis of numerous existing commerce standards. CBL has been deployed in several pilots including a major catalog interoperability pilot sponsored by the U.S. government’s General Services Administration (GSA), one of the largest purchasing organizations in the world. We are very excited that CBL will be part of the BizTalk repository and hope this will move the industry closer to a common operating environment for e-commerce.”
About Common Business Library
CBL was created two years ago by Commerce One with the realization that there will not be one standard for electronic commerce, but rather many standards. CBL alleviates this problem by providing a recommended set of XML building blocks, data elements, attributes and definitions that are common to many business domains, such as address, price, quantity, catalog and purchase order, which are used to create XML-based business documents. Reusing these components speeds the development of e-commerce standards and, more important, facilitates the interoperation of commerce applications. CBL provides a common semantic framework that unifies different industry standards such as Open Buying on the Internet (OBI) and Open Trading Protocol (OTP) for purchasing, enabling companies that subscribe to different protocols to still do business.
About the BizTalk Framework
Introduced in March, the BizTalk Framework makes it easy for businesses to exchange information between software applications and conduct business over the Internet with trading partners and customers. The BizTalk Framework includes a design framework for implementing an XML schema and a set of XML tags used in messages sent between applications. Microsoft, other software companies and industry standards bodies will use the BizTalk Framework to produce XML schemas in a consistent manner to enable integration across industries and between business systems, regardless of platform, operating system or underlying technology. More information about the BizTalk Framework is available at http://www.biztalk.org/ . More information about Microsoft’s BizTalk Framework initiatives is available at http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/ .
About CommerceOne
Commerce One is a leading provider of electronic commerce solutions that dynamically link buying and supplying organizations into real-time trading communities. The Commerce Chain Solution by Commerce One, comprising Commerce One BuySite and Commerce One MarketSite, enables companies to significantly reduce operational costs and increase efficiency by automating the entire indirect goods and services supply chain. As a result, enterprise organizations are able to realize a strategic competitive advantage as well as a rapid return on investment. Commerce One is located in Walnut Creek, Calif., and can be reached by phone at (800) 308-3838 or (925) 941-6000 or via the Internet at http://www.commerceone.com/ or http://www.marketsite.net/ .
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq
“MSFT”
) is the worldwide leader in software for personal computers. The company offers a wide range of products and services for business and personal use, each designed with the mission of making it easier and more enjoyable for people to take advantage of the full power of personal computing every day.
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Microsoft and BizTalk are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.
Commerce One, Commerce Chain, BuySite, BuySite Enterprise Edition, BuySite Hosted Edition and MarketSite are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Commerce One.
Other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
For more information, press only
For Commerce One:
Susan Dwyer, Commerce One, (925) 941-4386, [email protected]
Stephanie Cebulski, The Horn Group, (415) 905-4040, [email protected]
For Microsoft:
Sarah Gonzales, Waggener Edstrom, (503) 226-5637, [email protected]
Jason Gedeik, Waggener Edstrom, (503) 226-8234, [email protected]
