General Cost Breakdown of EDI Products for SMEs

This is a general guideline to lower-priced (not "mainline"*) EDI software for SMEs
"Traditional" Components of EDI software
- Translation to / from EDI standard
- Mapping / Data Transformation
  - EDI to proprietary flat-file
- Communications
  - Fax
  - Modem
  - Value-Added Network (VAN)
- Trading Partner Management
"Newer" Components of EDI software (Impact of Internet, technological advances, etc.)
- Multiple (and secure) TCP/IP communications protocols
  - AS1, AS2, AS3, FTPS, HTTPS, S-HTTP, etc.
- Business Process Management (BPM)
  - non-programmatic / graphical
  - "any-to-any" routing
- More powerful mapping / data transformation
  - "any-to-any"
  - easy methods to define formats
- Scalability
  - priced for scale
- "Adapters" to / from
  - Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems
  - all kinds of databases
    - "ODBC"
    - "SQL"
  - all kinds of "messaging" systems
    - "XMPP"
    - "SOAP"
    - "JMS"
    - "MQ" (the "communication" piece of IBM's MQSeries)
Boomi, Illicom, Softshare
- Full featured, including BPM functionality at lower cost than "mainline"
- Scalable

Emanio / Mercator
- Blended, low cost solution (when purchasing Emanio and using the Mercator "run time engine")

* The following "mainline" products start at about $20,000