Canopy International Joins UDDI Advisory Counsel Formed by Microsoft, Ariba and IBM; Canopy to Provide B2B Integration and Industry Standards Expertise.

Business/Technology Editors

NEWTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov.13, 2000

Canopy International, an e-business service provider specializing in enterprise and business-to-business integration, today announced that it has joined the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) Project's advisory council. The UDDI is a cross-industry initiative designed to accelerate and broaden B2B integration and commerce on the Internet through the development of e-business transaction specifications and standards.

Canopy joins IBM, Microsoft Corp., Ariba, and their coalition of business and technology leaders that recently launched UDDI. The UDDI Project is developing specifications and standards that will enable companies to find and transact business with each other quickly and easily. The goal of the UDDI Project is to offer the basic infrastructure for dynamic, automated integration of all e-commerce transactions and Web services. UDDI is defining a platform-neutral set of specifications to enable businesses to describe themselves and indicate their preferred means of conducting e-commerce transactions, and will also include the shared operation of a globally distributed UDDI Business Registry.

As a member of UDDI's advisory council, Canopy will help develop standards and specifications, and provide the expertise they have gained from their long series of commitments to universal B2B e-commerce standards and from their history of developing standards-based integration solutions for industry leaders. Canopy recently demonstrated the use of UDDI for automatic alternative supplier identification at the November 2, 2000 B2B Vendor Challenge, which was sponsored by the Open Applications Group and hosted by Canopy.

"We are delighted to add Canopy to the UDDI advisory council," said James Utzschneider, director of Web services at Microsoft. "They bring critical expertise in the area of open standards and have worked with numerous companies to solve B2B integration challenges. Their skills, together with their detailed understanding of industry business processes, will help us to further develop industry-leading standards and specifications."

"Canopy has made a long series of commitments to promoting universal standards for B2B interoperability over the Internet, and looks forward to assisting the UDDI advisory council in developing additional standards," said Bill Harrelson, chief technology officer of Canopy International. "This project will continue our dedication to promoting open B2B e-commerce standards, improving B2B e-commerce efficiency and flexibility through integration."

About Canopy International

Canopy International (www.canopyint.com) offers consulting and integration services enabling companies to create open interoperability in e-business relationships. Canopy's e-business integration services help business-to-business companies maximize their investments in e-business technology. Canopy provides full lifecycle integration services--including strategy, architecture, implementation and maintenance--that result in scalable, industrial-strength connectivity solutions accelerating information flow through the entire value chain.

About UDDI

The UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) Project is a comprehensive, open industry initiative enabling businesses to (I) discover each other, and (II) define how they interact over the internet and share information in a global registry architecture. UDDI is the building block which will enable businesses to quickly, easily and dynamically find and transact with one another via their preferred applications. UDDI is also a framework for Web services integration. It contains standards-based specifications for service description and discovery. The UDDI specification takes advantage of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), HTTP and Domain Name System (DNS) protocols. Additionally, cross platform programming features are addressed by adopting early versions of the proposed Simple Object Access ProtocoL (SOAP) messaging specifications found at the W3C Web site.