E-Business
WAP On Tap
E-businesses will use WAP-enabled wireless devices to access customer data, mine marketing data, and find services and products from suppliers and merchants. "The wireless phenomenon is going to trigger an acceleration of e-business growth," says Mark Bregman, general manager of pervasive computing at IBM. As wireless devices perform transactions and other complicated tasks, he adds, technologies will come from IBM and others to make wireless devices more secure and reliable, with better store-and-forward capabilities, more robust instant messaging, and improved data synchronisation.
Part of the technology challenge in extending e-business applications to new devices is facilitating cross-platform access to data. Many companies are competing in this area. Sun Microsystems and IBM would like to see Java and XML work together to accomplish this. Sun recently expanded XML support in its J2EE (Java2 Enterprise Edition) and announced the development of a Java API for XML messaging. An IBM technology called WebSphere Transcoding Publisher, together with Sun's iForce Solution Set for Mobile Wireless Internet, reconstitutes Web data into formats that handheld devices can display. Many kinds of content are being repurposed into WML (Wireless Markup Language) format for display on handhelds.
Crossing Borders
Translation and site globalisation technologies loom large for the e-business world over the next several years. Right now, the English-speaking world dominates the Web, but other regions are becoming big forces. XML and XHTML (an XML/HTML hybrid that maintains layout and presentation formats across platforms) are among the technologies that enable multilingual sites to draw content from diverse databases and feed the content into a translation engine that can generate the correct character set and syntax for non-English-speaking site visitors. Idiom Technologies and Translation Experts are among many companies that provide technology for automatic translation and site globalisation based on extensions to HTML.
E-commerce content management software suites offer integration with these translation and globalisation technologies. Interwoven and Vignette, for example, offer Idiom's WorldServer as part of their product suites.
One of the biggest issues surrounding the e-commerce world of late has been security. A wave of new approaches to security technologies is expected by the end of the year, when the patent on RSA's ubiquitous public-key encryption algorithm will expire, allowing the algorithm to slip into the public domain. Moreover, American Congress has passed legislation to allow far-reaching, easy authentication of digital signatures on the Internet, which should help commerce sites of all kinds consummate contractual agreements more easily and eliminate paperwork. The World Wide Web Consortium is backing many standards, such as SDML- and XML-based schemes, for implementing digital signatures.
IPSec (Internet Protocol Security) is a leading security standard currently in development; it introduces security directly at the network or packet-processing layer of e-shopping and B2B sites. Previous technologies introduced security at the application layer of communication with a site. Proponents of IPSec, such as Cisco Systems, point out that IPSec provides two choices for security service: Authentication Header (AH), which facilitates authentication of the sender of data, and Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP), which supports both authentication of the sender and encryption of data.
