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Computerworld - For years, enterprises have relied on traditional electronic data interchange (EDI) to simplify and speed up their transactions with customers, suppliers and other partners. Now, along comes the document-tagging language XML, with the potential to reach new markets, simplify access, populate Web pages and serve as an Esperanto format for transactions of all kinds. Should companies stay with EDI? Should they move to XML? Should they try to get EDI and XML to interoperate? Many are finding that they can do all of the above - if they use the right tools in the right ways.

			The Outsourcing Option Third-party services can handle EDI/XML interoperability for you. For some enterprises, bringing EDI/XML interoperability in-house may not make sense. Smaller companies may not want to bother with the effort necessary to support EDI, even with the EDI/XML tools available. Luckily, there are services that can handle your transactions for you, delivering the connectivity and integration you need. CommerceQuest Inc. in Tampa, Fla., provides one such service. Clients can have a variety of reasons for using this service. They may not have EDI capabilities, but want to do business with a company that mandates EDI. In such a case, CommerceQuest receives the transactions from the client company in whatever format, translates them to EDI and forwards them to the client's partner. The partner sends EDI to CommerceQuest, which translates the EDI into the client's preferred format and forwards it to the client. Another scenario is where a pure EDI client wants to branch out to non-EDI companies without implementing interoperability in-house. The client sends and receives EDI to CommerceQuest, which does the translation for the non-EDI company. "Either way, this saves companies a lot of effort," says Colin Osborne, chairman of CommerceQuest. CommerceQuest clients include Global 2,000 companies as well as e-business companies looking to link with business partners. Services like CommerceQuest make it less likely that companies will implement their own EDI capabilities, since that interoperability can be outsourced. At the same time, such services typically use XML exclusively internally and communicate with XML users. Ironically, this EDI/XML interoperability option will probably serve to further reduce the need for EDI in the future.

Many enterprises embracing both EDI and XML started out in the EDI arena years or decades ago. For instance, St. Louis-based Transentric, which began life as the technology arm of the Union Pacific Corp. rail conglomerate, has been using EDI for more than 20 years. It currently handles more than a million transactions per day with some