Business-to-business (B2B) integration is the automation of business processes and communication between two or more organizations. It allows them to work and trade more effectively with their customers, suppliers and business partners by automating key business processes.
What is B2B integration software?
B2B integration software provides the architecture that is needed to digitize information and quickly route it through an organization’s trading ecosystem.
What is a B2B integration platform?
A B2B integration platform helps companies integrate all their complex B2B and electronic data interchange (EDI) processes across their partner communities in a single gateway. The platform collects data from source applications, converts the data into standardized formats and then sends the documents to the business partner by using the appropriate transport protocol.
B2B integration software is available for on-premises use or integration services can be accessed through hosted cloud services.
The latest AI News + Insights
Discover expertly curated insights and news on AI, cloud and more in the weekly Think Newsletter.
Digitalization is pushing partner and customer expectations. Organizations find slow, inefficient and error-prone manual data process unsustainable in a digitally connected world. And every business has its own mix of systems and applications for exchanging files and messages with partners. Disparate technologies make it difficult to communicate.
To achieve goals like increased revenue, faster time to market and improved efficiencies, organizations need a successful business network—and that requires a modern B2B integration solution.1 With the right B2B tools, organizations can digitally connect and communicate quickly and reliably. This can reduce the time that it takes to get new products and services to market and help companies achieve the nimbleness and agility they need to compete.
Never say no to an onboarding request. Supports security-rich internet communications protocols, including AS2, SFTP, MQ, HTTP, Connect:Direct® and others.
Includes adapters to connect to back-end systems, including databases, SAP as well as cloud object storage with AWS S3 Client Adapter.
Powerful any-to-any transformation that converts documents from one format to another.
Enables the visualization of data fields and shows the relationships between documents.
Provides event management and reporting, auditing in centralized dashboards that can enable you to extend real-time activity and status information to your system administrators and your partners.
Encrypt data at rest or in motion. Robust certificate management including support of modern ciphers and algorithms.
Applies business rules with graphical business process modeling to the information being sent to identify any errors.
Allows big files to be sent faster. Features include any-size file and message transfer.
Supply chain company exceeds 29 million transactions in a day
Li & Fung needed to make sure that its supply chain management solution could scale to handle exponential spikes in transactions during China’s Singles’ Day sales event. The company worked with IBM Services® to test and tune its IBM Sterling® B2B Integrator solution, enabling it to process peak volumes of up to one million transactions per hour.
Resources
Stay ahead of the curve with our AI experts. Get weekly insights on the latest AI news, trends and innovations, along with their impact on business.
Read how CEOs feel about sustainability in their own words and how they are baking it into their business.
Find out why 89% of executives report that key investments in automation will include generative AI capabilities.
Learn how this retailer accelerated the rollout of new e-commerce fulfillment and real-time inventory management capabilities.
Related solutions
Learn more about electronic data interchange (EDI) and how it can help speed your transactions, save time and money, and increase accuracy.
Simplify and optimize your EDI and B2B API transactions with IBM’s market-leading SaaS solution for secure, reliable, seamless B2B data exchanges.
Enhance mission-critical EDI and API data exchanges within an efficient iPaaS infrastructure capable of integrating MFT, applications and events.
