See the President’s Blog for As2 Best Practices:
With the amount of search traffic containing “AS2” as a keyword, there is no doubt that AS2 is a topic of current interest. However, there is precious little information justifying AS2’s benefits compared to VAN based messaging solutions. Most IT and EDI professionals know that outsourcing B2B comms to a VAN has its benefits, all things being equal, the VAN deals with inter-system issues and message relaying, storage, archiving, and the special retransmission rules that only an EDI expert could appreciate. Just imagine the uncontrolled re-sending of a purchase order! Ok, so we know the why’s and wherefore’s of the VAN world. Running an in-house AS2 system often seems sensible, until you pass the 43 and 5/8th trading partner, and the infrastructure that you had dialed in to perfection starts to fray….causing late night trips to the cage, or remote sessions that last till the wee hours.
Many managed AS2 systems offered by various and sundry “operators” seem to be plagued and limited by the same variables that you would face with a licensed, self-hosted AS2 system. Not all of them, but many. And then there is the question of what to do about trading partners that are stuck on their VAN and just can’t make the leap to your fancy new AS2 hub? Might we suggest that there is a new way to look at hybridized AS2 plus VAN messaging.
It’s called ECGrid Unified AS2, and it encompasses all of the benefits of hosted AS2, run by the communications experts at Loren Data Corp ECGrid netops. Plus….with proper configuration, you can include connections via our VAN interface to include your VAN-bound trading partners. Let that sink in for a moment before I continue.
There.
VAN plus AS2 messaging into and out of the hub. AS2 for those who can and want to connect thus, and, VAN messaging to and from any of the over 100 systems that we interconnect to in the global mesh of competitive ecommerce communications systems, not limited to VANs, but several dozen Service Providers, direct connections to retailers and manufacturers, and Federal and Military Purchasing departments.
All of these services can be invoked, customized, and branded as your own using the now famous ECGridOS API, or turned up without a single line of code, by using the services of our crack netops team. Add to this the benefits of working with an organization that you can relate to on a first name basis. And, as more than icing on the EDI cake, you will be working with a professional communications speciality group – Our President, Founder, and CTO wrote the code that runs our ECGrid VAN, our ECGridOS API, and now, our Unified AS2 offering.
If you feel that your company is being treated with less dignity than it deserves, and you want to work with an EDI network that knows its business, that has a firm hand on its infrastructure, and who knows your name when you call, consider calling us, me, Alan W. , for more information.
