Standardization of electronic commerce in the cloud environment and its future evolution

With the rapid expansion of the Internet in the 1990s and thereafter, a type of EDI that takes advantage of the generally available Web services, or Web-EDI, has come into widespread use. However, insufficient standardization within the industries has led to the existence of multiple and dissimilar Web-EDI systems even in a single business sector, posing a problem that hinders the smooth flow of commercial transactions, i.e. the multi-screen phenomenon. Many enterprises that have introduced Web-EDI are faced with difficulties when trying to integrate it with their existing in-house system because there are various customer-specific EDIs. Cloud Computing has become the focus of attention in recent years because of its potential to invoke drastic changes both for the providers of enterprise information systems (IT vendors) and the users (enterprises at large). From the viewpoint of constructing and operating an EDI system, the utilization of the cloud environment helps reduce initial investment for IT system introduction and allows simpler co-existence of different EDI systems working in harmony. These characteristics raise the possibility of alleviating the multi-screen phenomenon, boosting the diffusion of EDI in many enterprises, especially in smaller ones. This paper is based on the research project conducted in NISTEP, national institution of science and technology policy, the ministry of education, sports, science and technology of the Japanese government (MEXT). The main implication of the study is the proposal for use-case buildings for the practice of cloud computing standards in collaborations with SMCs and universities.