We had a “standing room only” crowd at our recent GXS webinar, “How to Determine the Best Communications Protocol for B2B Integration.” In an easy-to-understand manner, John Radko, GXS Chief Technology Strategist, described the communications protocols available, the key attributes of each one, and how they work. During the webinar, a couple questions that stood out because they were submitted by multiple attendees were: “Which protocol is the most popular? Do you have any statistics?”
It just so happens that we had already planned to conduct a poll to find out those answers. Attendees were presented with the following question: Which Protocol Do You Use for B2B Today? Answer options included AS2, FTP/VPN, SFTP, FTPS. Below are the real-time results:
AS2 and FTP over VPN were used most often by the webinar audience. These results were consistent with the trends we see at GXS.
Look at these charts that illustrate the percentage of new clients that chose each of the protocols at signup between 2008-2010 and 2011-2012:
As you can see, between the years 2008 and 2010, 40% of our customers chose FTP/VPN and 30% chose AS2. SFTP and FTPS were selected by about 10% each. The remaining 10% chose one of all the rest of the protocols we offer.
But, the picture changed between 2011 and 2012. AS2 took the #1 spot, selected by 34% of customers; FTP/VPN dropped to second with 27% of new customers; SFTP moved up from 10% to 24%; FTPS more than doubled in popularity – it moved up from 10% to 12%; and only 3% of our new customers selected one of the other protocols.
