B2B Integration Reference Architecture

With the advent of internet and increasing globalization of business B2B has gained predominance. More over increasing complexities in business processes and sheer increase in inter business transactions is forcing B2B integration in big way. On the technology side, emergence of SOA, BPM and Cloud Computing has changed thought about integration.

Keeping in mind Business and Technological factors, I have developed a B2B Integration architecture which is platform and vendor neutral.



The bottom most Enterprise IT Assets block represents Business & Technical Applications and Services. These IT assets may be in form of packaged solutions or in house developed. These assets consist of in-house hosted solutions as well as ASP or SaaS like solutions. This layer provides information processing and persistence capality to fulfill business needs.

In any typical business organization, two protect IT assets DMZ is implemented using two firewalls. In the proposed Reference B2B Integration architecture, DMZ hosts B2B Gateways Proxy to surrogate real B2B Gateways. Just between B2B Gateway and inner firewall, Entity Management layer resides to resolve identity of incoming requests. On successful entity resolution requests are passed to B2B Gateway layer which is essentially a message transformer.
B2B Gateway passes the message to ESB which with help of Trading Partner Agreement Enforcer passes to appropriate piece of IT asset for processing.

Similarly Outgoing requests are passed to partner from Enterprise IT assets.