Out-of-the-Enterprise B2B Gateway Cloud Service for Emerging Markets

Traditionally, in a typical SOA environment, a B2B gateway is at the edge of an enterprise, and is responsible for performing business document exchanges with other enterprises. In the existing model often used in mature markets, the enterprise needs to incur the cost of hosting and maintaining the gateway. However, the scenario for emerging markets is different, since they are not totally reliant on exchanging business documents electronically. Specifically, the SMB enterprises in emerging markets may not be interested in hosting and maintaining the usually bulky gateway products. In this paper, we propose a novel approach wherein SMB enterprises would exchange secured business information to a B2B cloud service hosted outside of the enterprise. This service offers key B2B protocol capabilities and features such as packaging, security and partner on-boarding. In a typical document exchange flow, the SMB enterprise would send it's business information to this B2B cloud service which then packages it using the agreed upon B2B protocol and makes it available to the intended recipient enterprise. Using this model for B2B exchanges would work as an incentive to open up SMB enterprises for B2B business and will go a long way in reducing costs for SMB enterprises.