Carriers

A carrier is an entity to which you connect in order to exchange transactions. That is, a carrier electronically carries your files to a trading partner. When a trading partner supports its own direct communications, the trading partner and carrier may be the same. In other cases, the carrier may be a value-added network like GXS, and may be used for multiple trading partners.

Trading partners as carriers

If your organization is directly connected to a trading partner that you will be exchanging documents with, then the carrier has the same name as the trading partner company. For example, if you are exchanging documents with General Medical, the carrier is GENMED. In this case there is a one-to-one relationship between trading partner and carrier.

VANs as carriers

If you are connecting to a value-added network (VAN), for example, Sterling, the same carrier record might be used for all of the trading partners that you connect to with Sterling. In this case, there might be one carrier record for multiple trading partners.