British Telecommunications Plc, AT&T Istel Ltd and IBM (UK) Ltd chose the EDI ’92 show to announce a gateway between their three electronic trading services. British Telecom also took the opportunity to unveil a pilot EDI-X.400 gateway and a deal worth an estimated UKP5m over the next five years from Sears Plc to link its worldwide suppliers to the group’s UK high street shops. The three-way gateway has been developed over the last year, and according to British Telecom, is Europe-wide, operating via X.25 links using the Odette file transfer protocol. The move is an attempt to combat competitor International Network Services’ strengthening hold on the market by pooling the partner’s Electronic Data Interchange communities. Users will avoid having to make multiple subscriptions to each network – and apparently, there will be no extra charge for delivery to a foreign network. Such a link will prove vital to British Telecom’s potential success in the market and the company has one or two other ideas to press home the message that it is serious about the market. High on the list is the formal announcement of the pilot link between its EDI-Net service and X.400 messaging services. The company says that the gateway is particularly targeted at large corporations that have a private X.400 network and want to send electronic messages to trading partners that lack the ability to deal with OSI electronic mail facilities. British Telecom currently claims just over 5,000 users worldwide for its EDI service, but it does not quote UK figures. In a similar vein, it has teamed up with the Royal Mail which launched EDIpost, an attempt to make life bearable for small suppliers that don’t want to be bothered with EDI. EDIpost is an apparently perverse, but no-doubt useful, service that accepts EDI messages, converts them to a readable printed format and then forwards them by first class post to non-EDI users.
