Standards

ARTS: Standards for retail market

Who is developing products must pay attention to standards. Standards are essential to ensure interoperability among different vendors.

Organizations like Oasis and W3C have developed many generic standards. These standards are applicable to different markets.

The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) of the National Retail Federation is a retailer-driven membership organization dedicated to creating an open environment where both retailers and technology vendors work together to create international retail technology standards.

ARTS developed standards for Data Model, Point of Sale (POS), Reuqests for Proposal (RFP) and XML.

ARTS XML committee has developed 15 XML schemas like Customer, Price and Inventory. Furthermore, ARTS released an XML Best Practices document.

ARTS announced at January, 2008, the release of the SOA Blueprint for Retail and associated SOA Best Practices technical reports.

“The Blueprint describes the infrastructure components, tools, models for business services and how ARTS standards can ensure success in companies’ SOA implementation. While SOA is a generic infrastructure strategy that can be implemented by any industry, the differentiator is in the business services (functions). The ARTS Blueprint is specific to retail, defining many SOA services by the retail functions Buy, Sell, Logistics and Administer.”

Retail technology vendors must follow closely the standard development at ARTS.

Will ESB and BPMS from different vendors work well together?

Last week I was talking with a colleague about ESB and BPMS. Vendors are offering BPMS with ESB features, but the company where he works will evaluate BPMS and ESB separately.

I think it is hard to define where ESB’s responsability ends and BPMS’s responsability begins. Besides, what kind of requirement will guarantee that ESB and BPMS from different vendors work well together?

Standards could be used for ensure the interoperability of ESB with BPMS. But how to be sure the vendors really follow the standards? For example, if a requirement states that the ESB registry must be compliant with the UDDI Version 3 standard and another says BPMS must be able to discover services at an UDDI Version 3, when ESB and BPMS are from different vendors do you really believe they will always be compatible?

Choosing BPMS and ESB separately can bring the best of two worlds, but you must be careful to avoid a gap between the platforms.