What is a Business Process # A Business Process is the workflow that strings adapters and services together into something that actually does a job: receive a file, validate it, map it, encrypt it, hand it to an adapter for delivery, log every step along the way. It’s the thing Part 1 called “the closest thing the platform has to a heart” — because almost nothing meaningful happens in Sterling B2B Integrator outside of one running.
What is an Adapter # An Adapter is a service whose entire job is reaching outside Sterling B2B Integrator — connecting the Business Process Engine to “dissimilar systems and applications” that live outside the environment (IBM Documentation). An SFTP adapter opens a connection to a partner’s SFTP server. An AS2 adapter speaks the AS2 protocol to a trading partner’s gateway. Same underlying mechanism as any other service — the Business Process Engine calls it, it runs, it returns a result — but the work itself happens somewhere else, over a network, against a system you don’t control.
The admin console home page — where every session starts What is IBM B2Bi # IBM Sterling B2B Integrator does one job: move files between your business and your trading partners — banks, suppliers, logistics providers, whoever needs EDI documents, flat files, or XML exchanged reliably and traceably — and know exactly what happened to every file at every step. That’s it. Everything else exists to support that one job.
