Agoric Source has worked with a leading chemicals company to develop a functional gateway application to exchange CIDX-based messages between the company and its trading partners.  The solution was in particular developed to address Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) messages, an extension of e-commerce beyond the usual order-to-invoice process.

The gateway is RNIF 1.1 compliant, and conforms to CIDX standard as well.  The gateway framework is flexible enough to rapidly develop new message types as they are defined between a vendor and a trading partner.

Electronic data exchange and e-commerce lowers business costs to both suppliers and customers, and decreases response time to changing inventory and purchasing decisions.  However, the cost of implementing e-commerce solutions remain high, with commercial off-the-shelf packages often in the $100K price range, providing a plethora of features that may or may not be needed by the smaller vendor, while adding to implementation and support complexity that drains smaller IT departments.  And while RNIF and CIDX are based on industry-standard XML formats, their implementation is still tricky for the novice developer. The Agoric Source solution is focused on meeting the standards and addressing all the hidden "tricks" in a concise, reliable fashion, with easy-to-customize wrappers for converting XML to appropriate formats for consumption by internal systems.