Before you can move forward with any of the four steps above to exchange data with your business partners, you need to purchase the appropriate B2B integration technology. The B2B technology will collect data from source applications, translate the data into standardized payload formats and then send the documents to the business partner using the appropriate transport protocol.
Historically, companies would license B2B integration software to run in their corporate data centers. However, as cloud computing has become more popular, an increasing number of organizations are utilizing hosted integration services for B2B. The basic features of B2B integration are similar whether you choose to manage software in-house or utilize cloud services.
In this section we will refer to the technology—whether it is software or cloud-based—as a B2B integration platform.