The initiative has the support of industry heavyweights, including IBM, HP, Compaq, Dell, Lucent, 3Com, Agilent, and Cisco Systems, coupled with strong participation by solution partners such as SAP, CommerceOne, WebMethods, Vitria Technology, Andersen Consulting, and Viquity. In a nutshell, these four components encapsulate the exchange of information among trading partners. PIPs lie at the bottom of a hierarchy headed by clusters and segments. Clusters represent fundamental business process groups. Clusters are further broken down into segments, which represent interenterprise processes involving different types of trading partners.
Segments consist of PIPs that define specific processes.
For example, Cluster 3 is for order management, and it includes a Segment A that pertains to quotes and order entry. Business Dictionary, IT Dictionary, and EC Dictionary. Business data entities and properties are defined in the Business Dictionary, the IT Dictionary defines IT products and properties, and the EC dictionary defines components and their properties. One of the fundamental requirements for meaningful data exchange and efficient information processing for products and services is commonly accepted codification standards. Fortunately, RosettaNet supports three widely accepted codification standards.