A couple weeks ago, I was visiting a client in Nebraska; a long drive across some occasionally interesting landscape. Because I travel by car most of the time, I've become accustomed to having at least decent cell phone connection whenever I'm on a major highway thanks to the aggressive cell phone companies that advertise that they're "everywhere". As it turns out, "they" aren't really "everywhere", but most of the time I was able to get (more expensive) roaming connections when I really needed them. The lack of on-the-road cellular connections meant that I needed to stop more frequently at Starbucks or even McDonald's. So much for interesting regional cuisine experiences.

But while I was checking my email on one of those stops, I got a series of updates from the Yahoo! EDI-L group as well as some more personal updates from clients about GXS's services (or at least some of them) being unavailable for some period. As it turns out, the outage was short lived, and everyone lived happily ever after... so far. But the event reminded me of the press releases a few months ago when GXS announced its partnership with Verizon.

Part of that press release describes how the companies will leverage the technologies of the other. And aside from saying that the Verizon Business arm of the company will be selling GXS' services, I'm still unclear about what the arrangement provides.

Does it fit together?

And so, I'm not certain what, or even if, Verizon's networking technologies, which include cellular, wire, fiber, managed services, and who-knows what else have to do with the most recent GXS outage. In truth they likely played no part at all. Also, it's a fact that GXS is not the only company (EDI or otherwise) that has service interruptions.

What drew my attention to the issue was the immediacy of the response from the community of people who use EDI services. The discussions ranged from rants about service levels to sales pitches for alternative providers, and even (though probably only indirectly related) questions about ISDN replacing EDI(?)

What this tells me is that EDI technology, services, providers, and the people who make it all work are a closely connected bunch... for better or worse. And like Internet connectivity, is likely to be found in capacities that vary wildly from one place to another.

Ciao;

Cecil