Electronic commerce and multi-enterprise supply/value/business chains

As we create new on-line businesses with the speed of lightning their affil iated supply, finance and business communities - which are involved in more and more tightly connected, open trading - we find that we need to deal wi th hundreds of business partners, millions of buyers and sellers while we h ave to face incompatible IT systems. Challenges of linking multi-enterprise data and processes cost effectively, reliably and securely in real time re mains an open area in e-commerce. This challenge we shall describe as the p roblem of synchronization of multiple enterprise supply (production related )/value (finance related)/business (operations related) chains with chains and chains of chains. Triada brings a new e-commerce infrastructure into th is challenge: by extracting and tracking information, new trends in the eve nts of processes, the problem is reduced to sharing a sub-compact set of as sociations instead of sharing data. The mathematical properties of the asso ciation space, such as sub-compactness, and asymptotic stability enables us to share the information instantaneously within multi-enterprise chains an d chains of chains. Triada technology is an inflection point in the attempt to solve this problem by advocating "start sharing information/knowledge ( information in action)/wisdom (knowledge in action)" within your chains and chains of chains. It is an information integration (II) e-commerce tool. ( C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.