GXS Trading Grid Business Services APIs combine the power of the software as a service (SaaS) model with web services technology.

Leveraging the power of the GXS Trading Grid software as a service model does not mean less integration to your IT infrastructure, it can in fact mean more. By leveraging a growing number of “business service APIs”, partners and customers can gain real-time access to information—often more easily than is possible with internal systems.

Offering cost effective integration options is important for any business-to business infrastructure—and it is particularly important for the hosted infrastructure of the GXS Trading Grid. GXS is currently leveraging web services (SOAP-based), to provide a series of interfaces to the GXS Trading Grid.

The GXS Trading Grid Business Services APIs work is more advanced than our other web services projects for a number of reasons:

• We are creating new services, not exposing pre-existing services. The GXS Trading Grid is built on a SOA (services oriented architecture), and many common activities (like setting up a new trading partner) may use multiple services. Our APIs create a “façade” to all of that, and provide a “coarse-grained interface” to the Trading Grid (a fine-grained operation is like printing a word, a coarse-grained operation is like printing a sentence).
• We are utilizing more advanced standards, such as WS-Security and SAML. Because we are building atop the robust security infrastructure implemented in the GXS Trading Grid, we can use more advanced security protocols for our web services interfaces. The added security is critical, since the GXS Trading Grid is generally accessed via the Internet.
• We are actively developing both the web services, and many clients that use them. As part of the GXS Trading Grid Business Services APIs, the GXS Engineering team is producing a set of components (or widgets) that can run on a desktop and provide near real-time information on order processing or other supply chain data, much as a stock ticker or weather widget does on many desktops today.
• Partners are already developing to the interfaces. Since its inception, the Trading Grid Business Services APIs project has involved GXS Partner Program technology or global alliance partners who were building integration into their commercial software offerings as fast as we exposed interfaces to them.

Continued development of web services interfaces on GXS Trading Grid (and other software as a service models, such as Salesforce.com) may eventually make the difference between software and service insignificant in terms of integration capabilities.