E-Business: The First Wave of Electronic Commerce Electronic commerce has revolutionized the value chains of nearly every industry, regardless if their focus is on business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) markets and the extent of their distribution networks prior to the pervasive adoption of the Web. Many of the initial studies of e-commerce credited the Internet and the invention of the Hypertext Transfer Protocols with the flexibility of creating web pages that could easily be used for e-marketing and promotion (Rose, Hair, Clark, 2011). Only after the initial generation of e-commerce businesses had experienced the challenges of synchronizing their entire value chains to the new, demanding and time-critical needs of consumers online in the case of B2C and the speed of transactions and scalability challenges in B2B e-business make system and process integration a priority.

e-Business drove the need for much greater levels of integration standards and clarity of communication across the many different legacy, third-party enterprise systems that had to be integrated into the websites and selling systems for e-commerce to be successful. The need for integration standards was particularly important...

The creation of the RosettaNet standard was instrumental in creating a unified, industry-wide approach to managing transactions across the complex supply chains of high tech manufacturers, their suppliers, and their channel partners (Kauremaa, Nurmilaakso, Tanskanen, 2010). RosettaNet was created by Ingram Micro, the world's leading distributor of computer hardware, software and services, and sold through over 4,500 resellers in the U.S. alone (Kauremaa, Nurmilaakso, Tanskanen, 2010). RosettaNet was developed to create a common language for enabling transactions in real-time throughout the high tech industry's supply chains while also providing real-time visibility into the distribution channels, demand chains and the Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) processes across the industry (Kauremaa, Nurmilaakso, Tanskanen, 2010). By focusing on this level of integration across the entire industry, there was greater level of order accuracy and efficiency for the resellers who relied on the Ingram Micro system to serve their customers, while RosettaNet also made it possible for largest suppliers in the market to be…