Electronic Invoicing Announced on the AS2Gateway

We've just announced support for electronic invoicing on the cloud based Free B2B Trading Gateway AS2Gateway! This allows users to invoice trading partners via EDIFACT INVOIC messages over AS2, using a simple and intuitive web interface

Recurrent invoicing is simplified as any invoice can be saved as a template and re-used multiple times. The AS2Gateway converts all the invoice details into an EDIFACT D93A INVOIC message right now, and soon will support the other versions, as well as X12 based messages such as the 810.

In the near future, the platform will add support for parsing and generation of more message types, which will allow users to easily generate an invoice based on a purchase order received; or an advanced shipping notification (ASN) etc.

The AS2Gateway offers a free tier to support most SMEs that are required to electronically invoice trading partners for payment. For larger users, a premium tier is available with advanced options (to be announced shortly!), and for retailers or large corporations, the AS2Gateway is available for on-premise private deployment.

UltraESB Automates AS2/EDI Based B2B Trading for SKB Europe

We've just published a new case study on how SKB Europe, a leader in high-quality aluminium and plastic cases and boxes, has deployed the UltraESB as an AS2/EDI integration platform for Business-to-Business (B2B) integration.

The system initially integrates the ERP system of SKB Europe with one of its key trading partners Amazon, via EDIFACT based EDI documents exchanged over the AS2 protocol.

Read the news release and Case study from here
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/7/prweb9706746.htm

ESB Performance Benchmarking Round 6 is coming..

AdroitLogic has just announced the Sixth round of ESB Performance Benchmarking today!

Round 5 introduced a public Amazon EC2 AMI image of all the ESB's that were included into the benchmark, and the next round has moved further by requesting vendors and/or contributors for submission of better optimized configurations for the different ESBs to be tested.

Stability and Performance are both important to any ESB, and the last round saw half of the selected ESBs not being able to complete the benchmark successfully. Each ESB has since releases new versions, and we look forward to testing each one successfully!

For more information, visit http://esbperformance.org and email info@adroitlogic.com if you are interested to participate closely with us during this round!

UltraESB Connects Coupon Publishers and Major Retailers in Europe in B2B Solution for HighCo Data Spain

Today we are happy to announce that Storelabs, a European startup specialized in FMCG/Retail marketing and operations, has deployed an AS2/EDI - FTP/XML Gateway for HighCo Data Spain. The Cloud hosted gateway 'PromoHub' initially integrates the retailer Carrefour Spain, with multiple coupon publishers utilizing the HighCo Data coupon clearing services.

Read the full Press Release and the Case Study

We've just launched our Free EDI/AS2 B2B Gateway - AS2Gateway.ORG

Since its launch in January 2010, the UltraESB has the only free and open source ESB that natively supported the widely used B2B trading protocol AS2 (Applicability Statement 2). AS2 is used extensively in the US, Europe and Asia for B2B integration especially in the Retail and Manufacturing industries, and the UltraESB has been used by many organizations to integrate EDI/AS2 systems with S/FTP, Web Services and XML style systems.

The UltraESB is now used to integrate with some of the largest retailers in Europe, and the US by multiple organizations and it was natural for us to see the potential in offering a Cloud hosted EDI/AS2 solution as a Service (SaaS).

The AS2Gateway is powered by our flagship product UltraESB, and offers free EDI/AS2 connectivity for SME's and certainly disrupts the traditional market place in both the features offered and the cost savings. For example, the free tier allows SMEs to trade electronically with upto 5 trading partners and offers 60 messages per month.

We've also just launched AS2Integration.ORG which is a resource site on AS2/EDI integration, as well as the documentation and user guide for the use of the AS2Gateway.

Utilizing the UltraESB underneath means that the flexibility is virtually limitless, and we will soon expand this service to include Electronic Invoicing, EDI document creation and processing as well!

The AS2Gateway begins its 'beta' testing phase today, and you can utilize all of its features for free until we move into production in a few more months! No credit cards are necessary for sign up - so get your AS2/EDI trading account from the Free AS2Gateway!

Read our Press Release about the launch for more details!

Webinar: UltraESB - The Future of Enterprise Integration

Register for our free Webinar on using the UltraESB, on Tuesday the 29th of May 2012.

Click Here for more details and to Register!

OSGi - "Seduced by technology in search of a problem" :) ?

I was listening to a very interesting talk at QCon by Rod Johnson of SpringSource. The talk was titled "Things I Wish I'd known" and was about lessons he learned as an entrepreneur, which was very interesting!

Around 37:00 into the talk, he had a slide "Some things we got wrong at SpringSource" and it contained bullets about the over investment in OSGi for 2 years, which I quote below:

 - Seduced by technology in search of a problem
 - Clever technology but didn't solve most pressing customer problems

"Classic example of falling in love with a technology without considering the business implications.

We significantly over invested in OSGi and our dm-server technology for a couple of years. It wasn't a bad technology. Unfortunately, it simply solved a set of problems that a very small number of customers had., and yeah, we should have spent more time listening to the pressing problems our potential customers actually had.

That ultimately was something that we worked around, but we spent millions of dollars that we could have spent elsewhere."

Its interesting to note that about an year back, Ross Mason of MuleSource blogged about using OSGi in the Mule ESB in the post OSGi? No Thanks and said:

OSGi is a great specification for middleware vendors, but a terrible specification for the end user. This is because OSGi was never build for application developer consumption