EDI has been portrayed by some as a B2B workhorse slowly being put out to pasture by the emergence of XML. Not so, says Sterling Commerce Senior Product Manager Todd Margo, in the expoQ webinar “The Evolution of EDI,” part of the “Leveraging Your Existing EDI Solution for the Enterprise” webinar series, sponsored by Sterling Commerce.

EDI remains “a critical IT infrastructure for B2B electronic commerce,” Margo says. EDI has been around more than 25 years, he points out, and is very well-entrenched. Substantial amounts of transactions are conducted with it every day, and in the past year or so, there’s been a “re-recognition” of EDI’s importance, Margo notes. “No one claims it’s a dead-man walking anymore, as was commonly done during the dot-com craze. At the same time, no one claims it’s the wave of the future for B2B initiatives, either.”

Margo says there’s been a “rightful recognition” that EDI serves its existing uses well, particularly when it comes to revenue-cycle transactions. Which isn’t to say it’s not limiting in some ways, or that it will be untouched by Internet and XML-based B2B.

In fact, Margo foresees the Web and XML-based B2B in the IT equivalent of a peaceful coexistence with EDI, with the Internet as the “major driving force framing the evolution of EDI.” He calls an EDI-XML-Internet world “inevitable.”

EDI traffic continues to grow, though at a moderate pace, Margo points out. And an enormous amount of transactions still happen with paper as the conduit. Which means the potential of B2B has only begun to be realized. Using the grocery industry as an example of business overall, Margo said XML for B2B is still in its early adopter phase.

In general, “There is an expectation that EDI will continue to be substantially used, for basic revenue-cycle transactions. And transactions where EDI hasn’t been successful will become the realm of XML. There will be “inroads made by the Internet, and much EDI traffic is likely to move off the traditional EDI VAN and onto the Web, presumably via the EDIINT-AS2 protocol or something similar.” VANS are destined to become “more generic service providers, with EDI being only one of their capabilities.

To be sure, Margo says, there are factors limiting and promoting the growth of both EDI and XML-based B2B, and he runs them down for webinar viewers. He also goes into some detail about where EDI fits into AS2, UCCnet, ebXML, and the widely-discussed “real-time enterprise.” And fit it does, Margo stresses, even in the real-time enterprise, despite EDI’s reputation as primarily a batch-mode processor. EDI can be used to send batches as frequently as every fifteen minutes, Margo notes.