CHRIS: So you end up with these two camps. One, generally speaking—and there are all there are very detailed industry specific camps—but you have X12 which is pretty prominent in the US, and then EDIFACT which is very prominent in Europe. There's a lot more nuance to it than that, but suffice it to say, if you want to chat about it offline, feel free to get in touch with us. I would love to chat with you for however long to get into it and nerd out about how it affects buying groups.
But just for the high-level purpose of this discussion, it's a flat file, and within the standards you have different document types. Just think of it as like a set of document types. Then each standard, whether it's X12 or EDIFACT...and unfortunately within each of those there are specifics for different industries with standards. So you make sure that everyone's using the same standard or that there's a translation mechanism.
That's what Ron was talking about with VAN, and that stands for Value Added Network. Basically the idea is it's essentially a sophisticated FTP site that's going to allow people to push and pull files, and it has a lot of transactional governance that allows the data that you're pushing, these flat files, to run in a very organized and orderly fashion. Because, if you can imagine sending thousands of EDI files for an eCommerce group at scale every second, and some blip in the network occurs, and then 1200 orders are dropped. That just wouldn't do the job very well.
So an evolution of EDI started to happen. And think about it, in the 90s and the early 2000s, there weren't as many options that were standardized. So EDI was a big investment that a lot of players in the ERP space, and some of these different major software vendors, took advantage of and piled into EDI. And so VAN allowed it, like you said, to have more legs and be much more strongly typed or transactional guarantees.
So whenever you send something, you get a receipt that you've sent it depending on the VAN and how sophisticated it is. And whenever you receive something, you can get a notification. So it almost becomes like a PUB/SUB or Service Bus, which a lot of folks will be familiar with as well. And so you can take advantage of security, VPN tunneling, etc.
EDI really is a functional, very viable technology for interchanging data between systems, including purchasing groups. And because it has so much investment in it, it's just going to continue to have a lot of inertia, a lot of momentum into the future with industries that use it all the time.