The Commerce Interchange Pipeline (CIP) enables businesses of all sizes to exchange information electronically. The CIP packages and transports business data objects from one application to another, over local-area network (LAN), wide-area network (WAN), Value-Added Network (VAN), or the Internet. It supports business-to-business trading scenarios, including corporate purchasing and supply-chain purchasing.
The CIP interoperates with existing transport systems such as e-mail and HTTP, as well as with new systems such as the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) and Microsoft® Message Queue (MSMQ), and is designed to work with systems yet to be devised.
The CIP exposes Component Object Model (COM) interfaces so that developers and third-party vendors can create compatible components and easily link them together into any desired configuration. The architecture of the CIP allows components to be developed independently of transport protocols and of specific data formats.
Any application, including accounting and business database applications, can use the CIP simply by creating and executing a pipeline. The CIP is both data-format independent and data-transport independent. Because the CIP provides a common interface, you can take advantage of a wide variety of components, whether included with the CIP or provided by third-party vendors, to conform to the protocols required by any other enterprise.