1.1 A brief history of Managed File Transfer (MFT)

Research suggests that more than 51% of world's electronic information moves in the form of files and 90% of that moves between businesses and government entities. This aspect of information exchange is often referred to as Business-to-Business or B2B. The advent of B2B began in the early 70's. Large organizations could afford to host B2B networks that smaller suppliers and customers could leverage to participate in B2B. They were referred to as Value Added Networks (VANs) back then. These VANs were created on the basis of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). EDI was the foundation for most VANs and B2B networks today. In fact, EDI pre-dates the internet, and the first document to have ever gone across the wire electronically was a way-bill in the shipping industry way back in 1969. Every Fortune 1000 company has invested in EDI since. Because of the legacy, the technology has had over the last 50 years, every organization may have a different name adopted over time. Some of the names that we come across are EDI, B2B, e-Commerce, File Transfer, File Services, Supply Chain, e-Business, etc. No B2B or e-Business network is complete without an eco-system around it to be able to successfully run their businesses, whether it is Order-to-Cash processes in the Manufacturing/Retail, or Payments/Payroll processes in the banking, etc. These ecosystems typically consist of VANs, Suppliers and customers.

The proliferation of VANs and B2B networks either owned by large vendors like IBM, OpenText (GXS), etc or by large organizations in sectors like Transportation (Ocean, Rail, Road, etc), Grocery, Retail, Manufacturing, Insurance, Banking, Health Care, Government, etc; managing file transfers at scale, resulted in a need for Governance, Risk mitigation from a security and Compliance (GRC) perspective for file transfers. This need coined a new concept referred to as Managed File Transfer (MFT) in the 21st century. In today's hyper-converged infrastructures that span beyond the 4 walls of most organizations coupled with the cyber threats that originate not just from the outside but also from the inside, it is more important than ever before to have a comprehensive MFT strategy that not only addresses the GRC requirements, but goes well beyond to ensure privacy and security while striking a balance for unified customer experience in a multi-channel environment.

For most organizations, coming up with a long term MFT strategy is not easy given the fact that it is a moving target and the complexity only multiplies when SaaS providers and cloud vendors are involved. Even large vendors like IBM, OpenText (GXS), Axway, etc had to do a number of acquisitions to be able to provide a comprehensive MFT strategy and it continues to change year after year. While it is not possible to keep the target from moving, it is possible to envision the ever changing MFT space in 3 buckets: Receive, Process and Deliver.

It is not a secret anymore that the best technologies in the last decade or so have come from Open Source. Some popular eco-systems are Apache, GPL, MIT, etc. While a lot of emphasis was given by the open source communities to solve challenges around web, there are signs that game changing open source technologies like Java, Python, GoLang, Terraform, Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, Consul, Vault, CockroachDB, Elastic Stack, etc are going to allow organizations to become truly innovative in the ever changing technology landscape in the years to come. Despite the popularity of B2C marketplaces fueled by micro-services and APIs, given that the majority of world's information still moves in the form of files, B2B/MFT networks will continue to be the backbone for file transfers of all major corporations in the future. We wish to do what Linux kernel has done to the Enterprise Linux market. Enable future MFT products by creating an ecosystem of strategy and tooling. One such initiative to drive the Enterprise innovation forward is our effort to create an open framework, OpenMFT. We hope OpenMFT will give organizations a chance to have a vendor neutral strategy to integration and be able to integrate one or more middle-ware platforms across a heterogeneous landscape in order to create consistent user experiences within the enterprise.