The principal industry consortium trying to hammer out standards for corporations buying goods over the internet, the Open Buying on the Internet (OBI) consortium is set to finalize the next version of its standard. The OBI came out of ideas propagated by American Express and a group of companies calling themselves the Internet Purchasing Roundtable in 1996. Once incorporated as OBI, its aim was to produce a prospective set of standards for combining web technologies with legacy systems for the procurement of things like office supplies, maintenance materials and laboratory supplies: not particularly sexy stuff, but things that apparently account for about 80% of all company’s purchasing activities, according to OBI’s activities. The groups’ members include 3M, Dun & Bradstreet, First Union National Bank, Ford, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Office Depot, Oracle, SAP America and Staples, among others. The group will hold its next meeting on February 19 and 20 to finalize version 1.1 of the specification. Version 1.0 was published in May last year. The standard contains a vendor-neutral architecture, technical spec, guidelines and compliance and implementation information. More specifically, it recommends non-controversial things like HTML for content display, SSL for secure communications, X.509 for digital certificates and Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) for credit card transactions. The central plank for the spec is the ANSI X12 EDI 850 purchase order transactions set, with additions for running it over an IP transport. It is not simply EDI over the internet, insists OBI, because EDI deals with the purchase and supply of materials central to a company’s business, not things like office supplies. Lexington, Massachusetts-based Supplyworks handles the administration for the not-for-profit group, the membership of which is open to buying and selling companies, technology companies, financial institutions and anyone else who is interested, on an annual fee basis. http://www.supplyworks.obi
