A trading network is a group of organizations that have agreed to exchange business documents. Participants might include strategic partners, buyers, suppliers, and marketplaces (for example, Ariba Network), and are referred to as trading partners. Business documents typically include purchase orders, order statuses, purchase order acknowledgements, invoices, and other domain-specific business documents.

webMethods Trading Networks enables your corporation to connect to other organizations to form a business-to-business (B2B) trading network. Trading Networks is a format-neutral, business-document gateway that can recognize and process documents that flow between distributed trading partners. Through Trading Networks, you can exchange business documents with the partners in your network to relay production information. The business documents can be in any format that is recognized by two partners, such as XML and flat file.

Trading Networks is also the base through which webMethods products support numerous eBusiness Standards (eStandards) such as RosettaNet, EDI, ebXML Messaging Service, SWIFT, FIX, and CIDX. webMethods eStandards Modules use features of Trading Networks to perform the processing behavior required for the eStandard supported by the module.

Trading Networks and ActiveTransfer form the primary components of the B2B solution in the webMethods suite of products. Trading Networks provides B2B capabilities such as, partner management, document management, processing rules, TPAs, transaction monitoring, and so on. ActiveTransfer has the ability to send documents to Trading Networks. By using the managed file transfer capabilities of ActiveTransfer, you can leverage the B2B capabilities of Trading Networks to manage and deliver documents to partners securely and efficiently.