Babelway joins PEPPOL

We are pleased to announce that Babelway has just become the latest member of PEPPOL.

PEPPOL is the non-profit association, set-up in September 2012, that develops and maintains specifications for the PEPPOL e-procurement standard and network infrastructure in Europe. PEPPOL’s focus is to enable and simplify interoperability between electronic procurement service providers, networks and organizations.

The original purpose of PEPPOL was to enable European businesses to easily deal electronically with any European public sector buyers in their procurement processes. PEPPOL has now enlarged its scope to enable electronic trade between any supplier and buyer, public or private.

PEPPOL promotes the 4-corner model in electronic procurement. Each party of a transaction (the supplier and the buyer) uses its respective service provider who becomes a so-called ‘Access Point’ on the PEPPOL infrastructure. An electronic message transits via 4 parties (company A, service provider A, service provider B, company B) hence the name ‘4-corner model’. This is usually opposed to a 3-corner model where both parties, supplier and buyer, must subscribe to the same electronic service provider, creating huge resistance in adoption of B2B electronic processes.

By defining the interoperability standard to exchange electronic data between 2 service providers, PEPPOL promises to remove a lot of the current friction in the market.

At Babelway, we have always worked to enable easy interconnection, such that our customers could interface with any of their B2B partners, whatever the partner’s technology or service provider. Our philosophy has always been to support as many standards as possible to facilitate interconnectivity to the widest extent. Therefore, we welcome the PEPPOL initiative and are happy to join it. We believe this is a very innovative approach since it solves the routing issue (How can I know where I should send my electronic data?) without creating a centralized point of transit (a network) owned by a single entity, public or private, that would inevitably create suspicion. By addressing routing and governance aspects across service providers, it holds the potential to become a widely adopted standard.

We also welcome the news that GS1 (the global standardization organisation widely known in the EDI world and of which most of our customers are members) and PEPPOL have initiated a test to use the PEPPOL infrastructure to transact GS1 and EANCOM messages. We look forward to the results of this test.

For more info, don’t hesitate to contact us.