B2B software is old. Traditional B2B/EDI systems were among the first large-scale attempts to digitize processes in the middle of the 20th century, forming one of the cornerstones of modern business-to-business document exchange. Five decades later, B2B/EDI systems are a part of the core technology of digital supply chains and organizational data flows, supporting tens of billions of transactions every day.
Five decades of regular use can cement anything in place, especially software. For many companies that adopted B2B/EDI software back in the day, it is very hard, if not just impossible, to replace this foundational solution without bringing down the whole house — so ingrained it is in their daily processes. A 50-year-old solution may seem to be reaching the age of retirement, considering that these traditional solutions were never designed for the digital-first landscape, and certainly not for AI-enabled ecosystems that organizations are adopting today.
As one of the leaders in the B2B integration market, Axway understands the demand for a delicate balance between modernization and continuity of B2B/EDI systems. We understand how frustrating it is when the only reliable aspect of a solution that was considered state-of-the-art only a few years ago is that it reliably fails to deliver the value that you need today. You feel like you are working with a house of cards — one manual error separates from a collapse, but demands for connectivity only increase.
You may even think that EDI is just too old to be salvaged.
We disagree.
We understand that IT leaders and technical decision-makers need new ways of operating: smarter, more efficient, better automated, without compromising security and spending. We know that you want to break away from the status quo, increase scalability, foster growth, and sleep well after a hard day of work, knowing that your systems are all operational, healthy, and bring value to your organization.
We understand. And we act on it.
Leap higher with advanced automation
For quite a while now, we have participated in the EDI vs. API debate. Many are saying that it is high time to do away with EDI and focus on APIs: more modern, more efficient, more reliable. We at Axway believe that there’s no reason to retire EDI for good because EDI and API can work together and bring value to your operations.
Axway B2Bi maintains the tried-and-tested EDI format with API-driven automation. EDI ensures continuity of your operations, while APIs make working with EDI easier with automation and more flexibility. So the next time you hear that you need to onboard five new partners by the end of the month, each with hundreds of contacts, and none of them fitting your standard setup, that will be as simple as sending your new partner a link for self-service onboarding instead of weeks of late-night manual work.
See how you can automate partner onboarding in action.
This step alone will break the bottlenecks and drive your operational efficiency exponentially. As B2B software brings you value instead of trouble, scaling becomes an attainable goal rather than a headache.
As you see scalability in action, the next step is to automate insights. Having EDI and API working together leaves manual monitoring of transactions in the past. With an exposed REST API, you get real-time transaction monitoring capabilities allowing you to search and retrieve the transactions with specific parameters that you require. Advanced automation unlocks automated operational actions that replace manual processes. With Axway B2Bi, you can take action programmatically, manipulate data securely and correctly.
Expand integrations with Plug and Play
The market is stepping away from managing multiple integration tools in parallel and is moving towards unified integration foundations that support multi-pattern integration solutions. Axway enables this evolution across its portfolio, and B2Bi, being an integration tool, is not an exception. With the help of APIs, Axway B2Bi will take care of the workload that relies on EDI. But we suggest taking it a step or five further with advanced connectivity via connectors.
Most organizations today operate across environments: some data resides in SaaS, some in clouds, some may be locked on premises. Mixing environments in a hybrid infrastructure has its undeniable benefits, but every engineer who works with that kind of infrastructure knows that being hybrid comes at a cost: data gets stuck in silos and remains unintegrated. That slows down processes significantly.
Organizations move toward ecosystems, where data moves freely across environments.
B2B/EDI original designers could never imagine that kind of complexity, and it’s understandable why some people may think that EDI can never be integrated. Shall we leave EDI outside of ecosystems then?
You may, of course. But we have a better, easier solution: we can integrate EDI flows as a part of your ecosystem.
With the combined strength of Axway B2Bi and Amplify Fusion, organizations preserve the stability and continuity of EDI while gaining the flexibility and scalability of a modern integration and orchestration platform. Fusion expands B2Bi processes into broader digital ecosystems. It connects EDI flows with modern SaaS platforms, cloud native services, APIs, events, and data streams as the enterprise architecture evolves.
Together, B2Bi and Fusion unlock real-time integrations between internal applications and external systems. Through Fusion connectors and integration flows, organizations can connect B2Bi processes with platforms such as SAP, Amazon, Azure, Adobe, and many others.
See how Axway B2Bi and Amplify Fusion can work together in action.
And if you have just had a lightbulb moment, let me confirm your excitement. Yes, integrating EDI flows through Fusion makes it possible to expose selected data and processes to AI-driven applications through controlled interfaces such as MCP servers.
If you look at current advancements in artificial intelligence and think that it would be valuable for your workflows to have an AI assistant that can interact with your B2B data, you now have a real path to make that happen. Using an AI governance layer such as Amplify AI Gateway allows organizations to control how AI agents interact with enterprise systems. Security policies, access rules, cost controls, and operational guardrails reduce risks such as prompt injection or unintended actions.
With the combined power of Axway B2Bi, Amplify Fusion, and Amplify AI Gateway, AI-driven applications can generate insights from enterprise data and trigger controlled workflows while interactions remain governed, observable, and fully traceable.
This is a powerful capability that allows organizations to build an AI-enabled ecosystem by securely exposing critical data and processes. It turns AI from an experimental concept into a trusted and scalable operational capability without dismantling existing systems.
Build new maps in minutes with AI Mapping Assistant
More and more IT leaders and business executives are exploring use cases for AI that can help boost efficiency and bring value fast. AI excels when agents can roam freely across ecosystems, and enabling AI access to your data can be a game-changer for organizations modernizing their IT systems. But if you manage your organization’s B2B integration solution and you witness the advance of AI, you may have also wondered if an AI chatbot could one day alleviate the headache of manual mapping.
That day has come. Axway B2Bi AI Mapping Assistant can create new maps in minutes instead of days or even weeks. No more senior engineers spending days of their precious time manually mapping from an SAP IDoc to an EDI X12 purchase order. When you receive a mapping document from your partner, simply drop it into the AI Mapping Assistant chatbot and it will do the manual part for you. A few minutes later, you can download the map that is ready to use, and all you need to do is insert it into your Axway B2Bi Mapping Services, test and verify, and you’re done.
That is not the limit of the value that mapping with AI provides. If set up correctly, AI is guaranteed to reduce the errors that manual retyping inevitably brings. Automated mapping with AI capabilities significantly reduces the manual workload of your engineers, releasing time to focus on strategic initiatives and letting teams build confidence and leap even higher. Partner onboarding becomes simpler, communicating with partners brings fewer errors in the future, and orders are fulfilled faster.
Leap higher and build confidence with Axway B2Bi
Recently, we met Gabe, a tired and frustrated B2B leader, desperately looking for new ways of efficient operation in the age of AI and automation. Dealing with a barrage of urgent fixes and custom configurations, pressures from partners and leadership, and giving promises that he knows he can only fulfill in best-case scenarios.
Gabe was, of course, a fictional character. But his problems and bottlenecks are very real: pressure to make his 15-year-old B2B/EDI solution ready for AI and future-proof without rip-and-replace, looking for solutions that would let him and his team take more than a second a day to think about strategy instead of constant firefighting. All while Gabe knows perfectly well that one failed file transfer can cost his company thousands of lost revenues.
That’s not an easy life.
We wrote then: “’We need to onboard five new suppliers by month-end,’ his VP of Operations announces, as if Gabe could simply wave a magic wand.”
Today, you saw that with Axway B2Bi, Gabe can create a magic wand that would onboard five new suppliers by month-end easily and much more. With the increased connectivity powered by Axway B2Bi and Amplify Fusion, you can build your own AI-enabled ecosystem where agents roam your data flows freely, extracting information at your request. AI Mapping Assistant will immediately reduce the workloads of your teams by generating new maps and preventing errors. Unifying EDI and API flows gives real-time visibility into your flows, informing an intuitive dashboard of operations.
Think bigger, leap higher, and let Axway help you unlock your imagination.
Learn how you can accelerate with AI today.