Drummond Group Releases Latest AS3 Certs

April 1, 2008 Alex Woodie

Only five B2B software vendors participated in the latest Drummond Group interoperability certification tests for AS3, which were released two weeks ago. Nevertheless, nearly all of them offer products that deliver AS3 interoperability for i5/OS systems.

Drummond has been running interoperability tests for the AS3 (EDI over FTP) protocol for the last three years. Since that first test, AS3 adoption has increased in the market, as any new standard would. However, its adoption lags behind its more popular e-mail-based B2B protocol brethren, the AS2 standard, even though the “push-pull” nature of the AS3 standard offers more flexibility in how invoices, shipment notifications, and other EDI transactions can be distributed across the Internet.

Just the same, there is a demand for moving the AS3 standard forward, as Drummond’s fifth AS3 test, released March 10, shows. Participating in the January tests were several well-known names in B2B software, including Axway, Cleo Communications, Inovis, nuBridges, and Sterling Commerce–all of which support the i5/OS operating system, either with its software or as a source or target of data movement.

Drummond introduced a new test with the latest round of interoperability testing designed to see how well the B2B software products handle the delivery of very large messages, or VLMs, with payloads of 500 MB and 1 GB. All of the vendors passed the test.

To read the latest report, see www.drummondgroup.com/html-v2/as3-companies.html.