Introduction to DGI. DGI is a vendor neutral consultancy driving the adoption of technical standards. DGI is currently involved in interoperability testing for ebXML Message Service, AS1, AS2, CPFR, IXRetail and other efforts.

ebXML Message Service (ebMS) and DGI. DGI is deeply involved with ebMS, overall. We see ebMS in an early adopter phase, and moving forward. DGI executes interoperabilty rounds a non-competitive environment for solution providers.

In early 2002, 4 vendors completed ebMS 2.0 round. In late 2002, 14 products from 11 providers completed the ebMS 2.0 round.

What We Have Found

Marketplace acceptance. Interest in ebMS from major supply chains, including the CDC, Papinet, auto, govt/finance/transportation in Asia/Pacific, and European industrials.

Solution provider adoption growing: 15+ vendors with ebMS, 14 products interoperable.

Great base of common conformance. Vendors are able to execute interoperable ebMS messaging, message packaging, and digital signatures.

ebMS Specification is maturing well. Despite different interpretations of details, the spec enables interoperability. Most consensus issues involve use of MIME and SOAP.

CPPA is complimentary, but not required. About one-half of the vendors involved in DGI have implemented CPA. CPA can help to make implementations more flexible.

SMEs. It's not clear that ebMS is beneficial for SMEs yet. Providers are just now bringing out e-mail and Web browser solutions to address these issues.

International. We see anecdotal information that ebMS is well accepted as an international standard, and is able to avoid "not invented here" political issues.

Some Details

About one-half of the solution providers support Message Status, Ping/Pong and Message Sequencing. Few are supporting multi-hop.

There are some with Asynchronous messaging, but the spec does not assign clear meaning to HTTP reply, and acknowledgment. We recommend review of this area.

Strengths. ebMS is a solid message service, complimentary to nascent Web services.

Core packaging , digital signatures and error handling proving highly interoperable. Although there are some issues, asynchronous and synchronous messaging also generally interoperable.

Weaknesses

ebMS has yet to define a method for persistent data encryption. XML Encryption is the "default" technology, but there is no prescription for its use.

There are some differences in error handling, and no current data compression technique.

Weaknesses in the spec itself

As the standard matures, we expect to see fewer "MAY" and "RECOMMENDED" and more "REQUIRED" clauses. The spec has very few examples of Reply messages

Although we believe the spec has a well designed mechanism for extensions, we don't think the committee's thinking has been communicated well in the spec itself.

Miscellaneous

We believe that the committee should carefully look at the ability to leverage Web services standards, especially WS-Security in regards to an XML Encryption prescription.