Netfish and Visa team up on global B2B

Ecommerce business-to-business (B2B) integration vendor Netfish Technologies has teamed up with Visa International to develop products and services for the worldwide B2B ecommerce market.

The two companies will initially target the handling of invoice and payment data. Netfish will use Visa's Global XML Invoice Specification in its XDI suite of B2B software tools.

Visa's specification uses XML to exchange invoice and payment data across industries and technical processing platforms. The specification is not limited to Visa card payment. Developers may use it to integrate multiple payment types into the data flow.

The specification also contains a comprehensive list of data elements such as buyer/supplier, shipping, tax, payment, currency, discount and line item detail.

Alistair Duncan, vice president of Visa's commercial card information processing division, said the tie-up will allow Visa members to integrate disparate legacy and enterprise systems quickly and efficiently.

Netfish's XDI software includes a family of XDI transaction, messaging and process integration tools for B2B applications. The system makes it easy for separate business entities to consolidate their enterprise resource planning systems and automate workflow processes transparently and securely over the internet.

The XDI system also includes workflow wizards to guide developers through the creation of common business workflows, such as a purchase order. The system also includes a framework for creating custom protocol engines that integrate into the XDI server, and an XDI gateway option to define standard security protection.

Netfish chief executive Ravi Iyer said Visa's XML specification is the first multi-vendor endorsed standard developed with Visa technology partners CommerceOne, IBM, Sun Microsystems and ValiCert.

The specification will provide "an ideal complement to our B2B system integration systems", he added.

Analyst Gartner predicts that the B2B ecommerce market will be worth around $7tn by 2004.