Conclusions
With XML the Internet will move towards distributed document processing in a big way
Biggest opportunity for inter-business e-commerce
Newcomers to Internet-based e-commerce will probably skip EDI completely and go for the cheaper XML-based approach
- Less that 80K of 6.2M U.S. businesses use an EDI system (2%)
- Only estimated 125K world-wide organizations use EDI
- EDI cost and complexity makes it an insurmountable obstacle for small to medium sized businesses
Protocols for next generation internet businesses:
- HTTP
- SSL / Authentication
- XML
- HTML