With the surge in the development of B2B standards and adopting technologies, the need for demonstration and testing of these solutions has become evident. Different standards organizations and industry consortia continue to invest in individual demonstrations and proof-of-concept efforts to showcase utility of these emerging standards and technologies. Manufacturing companies have readily supported these demonstration efforts to accelerate the adoption of B2B standards among high-tech trading partners.

The participants in the demonstrations have witnessed time and again how these proof-of-concept, demonstration, and challenge efforts would result in significant waste of effort. This waste occurs when the demonstration software infrastructure needs to be repeatedly assembled from the start, when the participants need to re-invent procedures and rules of conduct that support demonstration, and when similar organizational roadblocks that were once removed need to be dealt with again.

The stakeholders also realize that with an extra effort, one could use the same demonstration infrastructure to perform much needed testing of different aspects of B2B interoperability. Such a facility would allow any single customer or vendor to utilize other participants application installations rather than investing in these applications on its own to test interoperability of the manufacturing applications in the B2B setting.