Sterling Commerce CEO finds little difference between EDI and EI

The growth of Internet-based e-commerce raises a couple of questions. First, what happened to those EDI infrastructures that were installed years ago? Second, what happened to the vendors that sold technology for those infrastructures?

One of those vendors—Sterling Commerce—is still around, and its CEO says the company's business really hasn't changed, even though its products have.

"EDI didn't go away," Sam Star says. "It is still the core of many e-commerce infrastructures, but you have to add new technologies like XML, business process flows, and new B2B protocols."

EDI was an integration play, says Starr, "but no one saw it that way because it was done in batch, with an intermediary like a VAN [value-added network]. Now things are done in real time."