As part of the European Community TEDIS Electronic Data Interchange programme, the European Commission has chosen a consortium led by Infonet UK to provide easier access to pan-European EDI facilities. The consortium, which includes Swedish Telecom International, TS1 Telefonica Servicios, PostGEM of Ireland and the Level 7 consultancy group, is intending to make it easier for so-called SMEs – small and medium enterprises, a ghastly acronym directly translated from the French which has no place in English – to use EDI by establishing a relay service via Swedish Telecom in Stockholm for other European EDI clearing houses. In this way, all the complex functions including protocol sorting, billing, message storing and forwarding could be handled efficiently across Europe; this would in turn make it possible for a small business equipped with personal computer and the relevant software to complete transactions with various trading partners spread over the continent. Infonet’s role in all this is to act as supplier of the EDI interconnection software and end-user software. Infonet’s Director of Enterprise System Services, Rudi Roth, said that there was simply not enough use of EDI in Europe at the moment, but by stimulating the small business sector in this way, he hoped that some form of critical mass could be achieved in two years’ time. He did not know the exact funding of the project received from the Commission, but as this is one of around 40 projects going for total funds in the region of tens of millions of ECUs – ECUs are sort of devalued dollars, so that’s eights or nines of millions of dollars, it looks likely that much of the investment is being put up by the consortium members themselves.
