International Business Machines Corporation

Spencer H Shepard, Iv

Yih-Shin Tan

Sajan Sankaran

Yongcheng Li

Bryan Eric Aupperle

A cooperative e-business complex. The cooperative e-business complex can include one or more electronically accessible e-business complex management services configured to handle e-business processing in the e-business complex on behalf of electronically associated virtual store operators, vendors, business partners and professional services providers. A virtual management office can be included which is configured to coordinate e-business transactions between the associated virtual store operators, the on-line shoppers, the vendors, the business partners, and the professional services providers in the e-business complex. Finally, one or more e-business complex management services requesters can be configured to remotely invoke selected ones of the electronically accessible e-business complex management services. Each e-business complex management services requester can invoke the electronically accessible e-business complex management services on behalf of one of the associated virtual store operators, vendors, business partners and professional services providers.

Cooperative e-business complex

Methods, systems, and computer program products for automatically transforming data or business messages to enable communication between parties in a distributed computing environment (e.g. between business partners who exchange data over a public network, and who do not necessarily use the same data formats), where this data transformation preferably occurs at the edge of the computing network. A set of transformation services is described, and include template registration, transformation, forward, and receive services. Services from this set may optionally be combined to create composite transformation services. A template defines how to transform one data format into another. Selection criteria may be provided to enable dynamically selecting a template at run-time. Using these services, one business partner simply hands its data off into the network to a network-accessible transformation service, where the data is automatically transformed into a format usable by its business partner and forwarded to that business partner.

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Durham, NC, United States of America

Spencer H Shepard, Iv