As businesses scramble to forge links with trading partners and B2B exchanges, the number of connections that the typical organization must maintain expands almost geometrically. And so do the difficulties associated with translating all the various business documents and processes from one application format into another and another ... and another.

B2B standards such as ebXML, cXML, EDI and RosettaNet help, of course. But with no single standard commanding universal support, and with new ones being proposed every other month, companies can't count on standards to solve all their immediate integration headaches.

Start-up company Contivo believes that its new eService offers an antidote to this problem. eService is an automated mapping service that translates different document formats--and eventually business processes and business policies--into their equivalents in other applications. So regardless of how many competing XML dialects you and your business partners use, Contivo eService can produce the mapping code needed to translate the different versions.

"XML is creating a tower of Babel, so to speak, and what you need is an auto-mapping service like ours that would allow trading partners to reconcile the different flavors of XML that they use," says Indra Mohan, Contivo's president and CEO.

The company was launched last July with $8 million in investments from middleware vendors webMethods and TIBCO, along with Bank of America. In January, the company received a second, $20 million infusion from MSD Capital and Voyager Capital, and officially launched its Contivo eService.

So far, the service supports only document mapping, but Mohan says it will add business process and business rule mapping in the coming year. Business process mapping would, for example, translate the various workflow steps in one company's procurement process into those of its partner. Likewise, business rule mapping would reconcile differences in policies, such as maximum payment terms of 45 days versus 30 days.

"There are software tools out there now that can help you do this sort of mapping manually, but none that do it automatically," Mohan says. "If I have an SAP back-office and you have a RosettaNet XML-based application, you can get a tool to allow you to bring up your SAP purchase order, look at all of the fields, then bring up the RosettaNet purchase order, look at all of the fields in it, and then manually connect the various fields."