As the estimated 1,000 or so online exchanges compete for their survival over the coming months, emerging standards under development by the RosettaNet and BizTalk.org consortia promise to play a crucial role.

"You are always going to have companies that speak different [computer] languages, so there will always be a need to translate from one company to another," says David Yockelson, an analyst with the Meta Group.

Because companies will never be able to fully agree on how they construct and use information within their organizations, standards such as RosettaNet and BizTalk are critical if companies are to share information without having to completely reengineer their internal applications.

RosettaNet

RosettaNet, a consortium formed to develop e-commerce standards for the IT, electronic components and semiconductor manufacturing industries, boasts more than 300 participating companies. A key product of the RosettaNet effort is the set of Partner Interface Processes (PIPs), which are specialized XML-based dialogues that define how business processes are conducted between trading partners. The PIPs define processes for a range of business activities, such as inventory, pricing, sales management, order handling, product configuration and shipping.

Says Gordon Hilton, vice president of Toshiba Information Systems, a RosettaNet member: "Until now, true electronic commerce was a holy grail. It was something that the PC industry wanted but could not fully implement without the common standards necessary to make electronic commerce truly functional and reliable throughout a single supply chain. More significant is that it was impossible to implement e-commerce across an industry."

One of the biggest problems that exchanges need to address—and that RosettaNet promises to solve—is making content accessible to customers. Catalog software vendors are currently developing technology to compare product information created by a single vendor's back end, but complex markets with several buyers and sellers need to define standardized ways of describing things so they can compare products, costs, contract terms and delivery dates from multiple vendors.

Sue Aldrich, a Patricia Seybold Group analyst, explains: "Those sorts of content issues are going to get harder. But RosettaNet is working to address this issue with standard sets of categories for comparison of electronic products like DVD players, computers or printers."

BizTalk