Trading partner integration, also known as B2Bi, encompasses the automated exchange of information between different organizations such as partners, customers, suppliers, distributors and others. B2Bi enables collaborative business relationships that facilitate real-time decision-making, accelerated cycle times and better monitoring of partner performance.

The traditional challenge with B2Bi is the complexity and expense of integrating a wide variety of heterogeneous IT systems. The challenge becomes even greater in enterprise settings where thousands of business partners and hundreds of business processes are involved.

Web Services offer significant benefits for B2Bi due to their broad interoperability and loosely-coupled design.