Old Wireless Switches Join The Internet Of Things

via https://hackaday.com/2019/03/21/old-wireless-switches-join-the-internet-of-things/ | Hackaday

EDI and Kilo-characters

Jeff Lanford is an experienced IT professional specializing in EDI, system integration and application development. When not consulting, Jeff Lanford continues to stay abreast of the latest technologies and leading trends of the industry through training and quality business relationships.

What is a kilo-character? In the EDI industry, service providers will typically bill transactions by the volume of kilo-characters. A kilo-character corresponds to one thousand characters in a file. A character corresponds to a every single character, every single space, and every single delimiter contained within an EDI file. When an entity like OpenText bills a customer, they typically bill by the number of kilo-characters for a given month. To determine the number of kilo-characters, you divide your total number of characters by a thousand. Most operation systems (windows, mac) will allow this information to be readily available by simply viewing the file properties.

There is a trend in the industry that involves billing to occur by transaction (or message) rather than kilo-character. This takes the complexity out of the equation by ignoring the volume of data contained within a message. A message equals one specific business transaction. An invoice or shipment advice would be an example of one transaction count.  There can be one or more transactions within a file.

Why EDI Truly Is a Success

Jeff Lanford served as an EDI developer for Kids II, Inc. in Atlanta, Georgia for over 16 years. In this role, Jeff Lanford evolved the company's EDI platform into a best-in-class solution that helped grow the company into a half a billion dollar business.

Will EDI ever be replaced by another technology? It’s my opinion that EDI will be around forever (or as long as business involves an order, shipment and invoice).

When I began my career in EDI in August of 2000, there were a lot of discussions being had in the technology arena that EDI would eventually be replaced by another solution. During this time, one of the first threats to EDI as touted in popular trade articles was XML. Sure, XML filled a great need as a data format to be easily defined, exposed and consumed from system to system. However, its highly extensible model was too broad for it to become a replacement for EDI. As such, while XML gave rise to new tool sets for interpreting and processing data from system to system, it never took hold as a major player in terms of a data standard that businesses use to exchange electronic documents.

Next in line as a potential threat to EDI was the advent and adoption of web services and APIs. What made these such a viable threat to EDI was the near real-time component that web services and APIs have by design. This movement has been successful yet it still hasn't become a replacement to EDI. I believe the primary reason for this is due to the fact that there is still a strong need for IT architectures to isolate the processing of electronic data. Web services and APIs typically leverage a synchronous transaction model where line-of-business systems are being altered by external trading partners in a real-time fashion. Traditional EDI maintains a layer of protection to the line-of-business systems where validation is isolated from the core business which minimizes the corruption of a given organization's system of record. Web services and APIs do offer validation capabilities and many support this approach, but in my experience, organizations are a lot more effective when employing EDI versus web services/APIs because by isolating validation from the core business, users have a lot more trust in their data and as a result makes them more apt for quick decision making.

What are some other technologies that have posed a thread to EDI?

Lyoto Machida Moves to Bellator

Information technology consultant Jeff Lanford worked with Kids II in Atlanta, Georgia, building a wide range of skills in e-commerce and applications development. When not consulting on IT issues, Jeff Lanford enjoys watching a sports, including mixed martial arts. His favorite fighter is Lyoto Machida, a Japanese-Brazilian fighter who has been successful in both his 2018 bouts.

Lyoto Machida reached a verbal agreement with Bellator in June 2018 to join the mixed martial arts organization. His contract with Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) ran out after his recent bout with Vitor Belfort, and the former UFC light heavyweight champion now has his eyes set on a Bellator belt. He still maintains friendly relationships with many UFC fighters and personnel, but considered the Bellator offer to be in his best business interests.

Machida has no specific fighter he is interested in fighting during his debut, but is interested in fighting as soon as possible. He would prefer to make his Bellator debut during September or October, and would like to have the chance to fight on the same card as his older brother, Chinzo Machida.