GridLite enables rapid community on-boarding as it allows businesses to participate as spokes in an on-line hub& spokes community. Strategically placed in between a hub and its spokes is an intermediary host called GridMaster (hosted by GridNode). As GridMaster takes on the role of activating and maintaining community-defined processes and templates, a whole community consisting of hundreds of trading partners can be on-line enabled (via the deployment of GridLite at each spoke company) in a matter of days to transact with the community hub once the hub goes live.

As GridMaster supports a variety of standards (e.g. RosettaNet, CIDX, AS2 etc.) the hub can potentially use any of these transport mechanisms to transmit business documents via GridMaster . Between GridMaster and each spoke company (with GridLite installed), the RosettaNet Automated Enablement (RAE) standard is employed. As GridMaster also takes on the role of data transformation, template control and document store & forward, this paves the way for the provision of a light-weight, cost-effective solution ( GridLite ) to be rapidly deployed at the spokes end.

For the hub, where before it faced the significant challenge of getting all its suppliers (especially small to medium sized suppliers) to transact with it via a single, unified interface, this problem can now be addressed as the cost and deployment effort become a lot more manageable for these small to medium sized suppliers. As a result, the traditional issue of not being to realize potential ROI due to the need to continue operating its legacy B2B systems and hub-maintained portal can now be addressed.

For the spokes, where before these companies face the challenge of having to deal with different interfaces, portals and applications for each online community they belong to, the problem can now be addressed as GridLite enables these spokes company to participate in multiple communities using the same interface ( GridLite ) while still allowing for different community-defined business processes and document templates to be featured within the software. The roll-out and maintenance of these community definitions are rapid because of the use of wizard-based installation and managed upgrades like that typically employed by common client applications such as Anti-Virus softwares. This means that the spokes no longer has to train and retrain multiple users on the different interfaces, applications and portals just to participate in multiple online trading communities.

All these, while still ensuring that businesses can continue to benefit from the advantage of true end-to-end delivery of documents. Having the documents automatically delivered all the way to you gives you the following advantages:

• Faster Access to Your Data without being hampered by low bandwidth or inconsistent connectivity with the outside world (since your Data resides locally)
• Option to extend real-time integration to your back-end system
• True Ownership to Your Data