Not much, at least for now. But a relatively obscure, 150-vendor effort to pave the way for reliable transport between critical business applications, such as SAP and Lotus Notes, may change all that. The Business Quality Messaging (BQM) forum has been working quietly since April 1997 to define the "bulletproof" communication behaviors needed for application-to-application communications and transactions.

Big-name BQM members include AT&T, BEA, Candle, Cisco, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Pfizer and Microsoft (www.BQM.org). Yet you aren't likely to find many commerce service providers that are even familiar with the effort. The forum, however, plans to mount an educational campaign over the next year.

The ultimate goal of BQM is to build adjunct support onto existing applications so that gateway services can seamlessly interconnect these applications over the many transports--including the Internet--that will exist in mission-critical business-to-business e-commerce. In other words, the forum is defining standard functions, rather than APIs.

BQM essentially spells out the rules of the distributed processing road for the special quality of service and reliability requirements of these business applications. For example, an upcoming BQM version will specify how long a transmission can remain on the network before it is returned to the sender, or it might be used to specify how a transmission should be cached, encrypted and delivered once it reaches a particular corporate network.

Today, the alliance is taking its first steps toward this encompassing goal with demonstrations and prototypes, such as the autumn 1998 demo it presented that illustrated how an order could be placed on a SAP R/3 application and delivered first to a BQM-enabled MessageQuest MQSeries product and then to IBM's BQM-enabled value-added network. From there, the path led to NEON's object broker and on to IBM's BQM-enabled MQSeries product, which, in turn, communicated with a supplier using business-to-business procurement software from TRADE'ex.

Mark B. Smith, chairman of the alliance, says that if momentum continues, he expects a commercial launch of BQM-compliant products early in 1999. By midyear he anticipates completion of BQM network services work to enable intercompany services--for example, permitting a SAP/Compaq implementation to communicate with a SAP/Intel implementation over a VAN (value-added network). From there, the goal is to begin relying on message broker services to translate between, say, a SAP R/3 back end and a front end such as Clarify. Smith says IBM Global Networks currently is the only VAN offering message queuing, but he expects other VANs--like AT&T or ARINC (the airline industry VAN)--to follow suit. Smith projects that by the end of 1999 the first wave of ISPs also will begin offering gateway services.

How does all this play with other efforts to build rock-solid commerce highways across a not-so-reliable Internet? Smith thinks BQM will exist in the middle, complementing efforts to define EDI over IP as well as the Open Buying on the Internet (OBI) specification. For example, ERP systems, such as SAP, already have interfaces to EDI--so these applications and EDI will exist above BQM. Transports, including SNA or IP, exist below.

OBI (www.openbuy.org) is better known than BQM, with about a half dozen CSPs (commerce service providers) in our survey saying they already support it. OBI taps a number of existing specifications, such as those for purchase orders, HTTP, SSL and crypto, to create a uniform environment for the sale of low-cost, high-volume goods. While this effort could eventually overlap BQM's, Smith says it's too early to consider such issues, since the goal at this point is still one of validating and integrating existing technology frameworks.