The connection runs backward from what you’d guess # Most people’s first assumption about a box sitting in the DMZ is that your trusted, internal network reaches out to it — the secure side initiates, the exposed side listens. A Perimeter Server does the opposite. The core B2Bi engine sitting safely inside your network never opens a connection out into the DMZ at all. Instead, the Perimeter Server — the box actually facing partners and the internet — dials back in to the core engine and holds that connection open. Partner traffic lands on the DMZ box first, and only then gets forwarded inward over a channel the DMZ side itself established.
The confusion I flagged back in Part 1 # I called this out in Part 1 and promised to come back to it: File Gateway is not a separate product competing with B2Bi. It’s a purpose-built UI and routing layer sitting directly on top of B2Bi’s mailbox and adapter machinery, built specifically so partner file exchange can be managed without anyone touching BPML directly. I still see people who’ve run Sterling for years talk about the two as if they’re alternatives you choose between. They’re not — one is the foundation, the other is a way of working with that foundation without writing a Business Process by hand.
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.
