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Since its initial release in 1986, the OFTP protocol has been in continuous and very demanding use by thousands of enterprises across dozens of countries and all economic sectors. It is notoriously difficult to make decisions in the fast paced world of computing, and even harder to make the right decisions. In fact, few technological decisions persist over greater time horizons than a few quarters, let alone 25 years. With the release of OFTP2, Axway believes that Odette will continue to be one of the most productive supply chain collaboration standards for the next 20 years as well.

Why will OFTP2 play so vital a role in modern enterprises? Three primary factors:

The Business and Market Side

There are a number of critical business “intangibles” that, although difficult to pin down in terms of ROI, undeniably affect your bottom line.

Market Conditions

Globalization of the automotive sector makes it very expensive to operate in an environment where procurement is dependent on regional compliance business protocols and processes. Yet consolidation and centralization of procurement requires world-wide availability of the relevant technology and business protocols in use – this capability is what OFTP2 over the Internet delivers. Historically, second- and third-tier suppliers have too often been unable to leverage automated B2B processes because the technology has been too expensive. In a globalized economy, however, most of those suppliers are now based or delocalized in remote regions; keeping them out of controlled processes is no longer possible.

OFTP V2: 20 More Years?In 1984, the Organization for Data Exchange by Tele Transmission in Europe (ODETTE) was formed at the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders Limited (SMMT) in London, with participation from national automotive organizations spanning Benelux, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden. At the time, IBM had not even announced the AS/400 range of computers; Solaris lay seven years in the future; and the Internet was still a discussion point inside the Department of Defense.

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Axway has over two decades of experience providing leading Business-to-Business integration (B2Bi) solutions to automotive manufacturers, suppliers, and their service partners around the world. In fact, the majority of the world’s top 100 suppliers run Axway’s OFTP and B2Bi platforms, including hundreds of OFTP installations, high-performance gateways and EndPoints.

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OFTP2 is available world-wide, and can be made available to all types of suppliers, no matter how low-tech or unsophisticated their network capability. Axway OFTP2 solutions can provide all of your trading partners and suppliers an appropriate solution that adapts to their business needs and technical environment – from WebEDI, light-weight endpoints to ERP connectors and complete B2B exchange solutions. Compliance

When the auditors come knocking on your door, OFTP enables you to respond with phrases like “accounted for”, “tracked and traced”, “logged and noted”. Other protocols do not. From a pure accounting point of view, it may be difficult to assign a dollar value to being able to say with confidence exactly what information arrived or exited, and at exactly what time. But even without a price tag, what is that level of confidence worth to your business?

Certainty

When it comes to the Internet, if you’re not connected – or if your connection drops for the time it takes to sneeze – you run the risk of missed orders, failed transfers, or lost notifications to your bank. With OFTP2, you never miss an order or a call. What is that certainty worth to your business?

Security

With OFTP2, powerful security capabilities are built in, not bolted on. This is key not only for managing compliance, but also for the kind of robust data loss prevention so critical to sustaining a climate of trust between you, your clients and your suppliers. Their data is safe with you; your data is safe with them. And while trust may be hard to evaluate in the profit and loss columns, the question remains: How long will partners remain partners if they can’t trust you?

Continuity

Everyone wants to maximize their trading community; everybody has an Internet connection; and everybody can use TCP/IP. But not everybody wants to send business-critical trading data over a network that has been proven insecure and failure-prone. By continuing to leverage OFTP, you ensure an essential thread of continuity and security in your business relationships.

The Investment Side

If you’re reading this white paper, chances are you already have software and business processes built around OFTP. There are a lot of questions you asked and answered a long time ago in choosing OFTP, and you’ve generated a lot of momentum behind the customer relationships, software, and hardware you already have in place. Getting the most out of these relationships is what ROI is all about. Switching to another system or technology can generate huge re-investment costs.

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The Technical Side

OFTP1 was already robust, powerful, compressed, fail-safe, able to restart, and secure, secure, secure. OFTP2 is even better – it’s all of the above, plus highly flexible and designed to handle huge files. In the event of a transfer failure, OFTP2 automatically restarts transfer at the point of failure, eliminating the need to resend the entire transmission. And just like its predecessor, OFTP2 works over ISDN, X.25, and TCP/IP networks, offering powerful technology that guarantees session security, file security, and secure authentication.

The Future of OFTP2

When OFTP was first released 20 years ago, competition among protocols was low. Since that time, business protocols have proliferated, and today numerous industry-specific B2B protocols are in use globally; for example SFTP, AS/2, RosettaNet and ebXML, SMTP, PEL and HTTP. Axway software manages and works with all of these protocols – we’ve even been involved in defining some of them.

Axway was the first company to recognize OFTP2 as the right successor to OFTP, and we firmly believe that the protocol will continue to set the industry standard for the next 20 years. Now that OFTP2 has been released, we are not alone in this opinion – manufacturers around the world are jumping on board with OFTP1 replacement campaigns.

Will OFTP2 technologies still be headliners 20 years from now? Will increasingly burdensome government legislation and globalized competition continue to preoccupy CIOs? And will the proliferation of world-wide standards bring corporate IT closer together, or drive them further apart?

Only time will tell. But Axway can confidently make at least one prediction: The amount of data businesses need to manage will only increase – dramatically. With every year that passes, your systems and applications are going to have to transport, exchange, process, and store an ever greater amount of data. How you manage that data explosion, and how you are – or are not -- able to secure data exchanges over public networks could be the difference between thriving and failing.

With data compression, full-spectrum security, built-in acknowledgements, transfer restarts, and optimized use of any network from VANs to Internet, OFTP2 is looking likely to be one of the major protocols of the future.

Successfully Implementing OFTP2

Here are some important issues to consider as you plan your OFTP2 implementation:

Determine which points in your end-to-end process need to be OFTP2 • compliant.

If your partners are OEM hubs, choose an endpoint capable of conforming to • your partner’s OFTP2 guidelines.

If you operate a full hub for your suppliers, customers and partners, define • rules for partner on-boarding (partner information and certificate exchange, connection test, etc.), service and security levels, and minimum technical infrastructure your partners will need.

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Design and implement an OFTP2 infrastructure based on your security rules, • including:

the right-sized Internet access »

an OFTP2-conformant firewall »

a secure, reliable and scalable DMZ gateway (such as Axway Secure Relay) »

a private key Infrastructure, including certificate procurement »

an appropriately sized and scalable OFTP2 server connecting your DMZ to »your backend environment

Choose between a SaaS or on-premise delivery mode. •

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Axway is the Business Interaction Networks company – the only provider in the market today to manage, run, secure, and monitor all of your business interactions, including email, files, messaging, services, events, and processes. Serving over 11,000 organizations in more than 100 countries, Axway facilitates the multi-enterprise transactions, processes and integration that accelerate business by eliminating the barriers between vendors, customers, departments, partners and suppliers. Axway's comprehensive offerings include business-to-business integration, managed file transfer, secure email, business activity monitoring, enterprise application integration, service-oriented architecture, business process management, track & trace and identity validation solutions. Axway provides professional and managed services, as well as cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings. Headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, Axway's global presence spans 20 countries. Copyright © Axway, 2010 All rights reserved

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