As trading partners become more tightly connected and translation services take over an increasing amount of the detailed work around converting transaction files between trading partners, the actual format of the inbound and outbound documents will become less and less a concern. What remains is the reliability of the conversion and the consistency of the integration with each partner's ERP and other systems.

At the point that the technical details of data transformation fades from top of mind management, and is reliable and consistent, the actual format of the data will also fade from concern. I see this happening when major enterprise applications like ERP, HR, and CRM include built-in facilities for generating and accepting transactions. These can, and are likely to be EDI formatted documents, but when executed, those documents flow transparently to the supply chain service provider (likely a SaaS provider) who accepts the documents in their predetermined formats, converts them to an internal data structure, and then sends them on their way to their intended recipients in what ever format those trading partners require.

The details of those transformations are unimportant to the trading partners themselves. Some will chose XML formats because they have internal processes that use that format, while others will choose EDI formatted documents, probably because they have been using the format for many years. And still others may chose flat files, .XLS files, or any format they like based on the capacity of their transport service provider.

So while the debate about XML replacing EDI is not the hot debate it once was, the reality of XML being used with increasing frequency is an accelerating trend. But in the end, very few trading partners will actually care.