You can now add a VAN to your Tediware account

Tediware now offers an integrated value added network (VAN) service. Open your subscription page, scroll down to the Add-ons section, and click “Subscribe to VAN”.

Commport will provision a mailbox on their network, and when it’s ready, Tediware will deliver a fully functional VAN connection to your account - and not just any VAN connection. What you get is really great:

• A fully managed connectivity service: you can run AS2, SFTP, FTP and more over this connection. Commport’s team will work directly with you and your trading partners to set these up.
• No per-trading partner fees. Like everything else in Tediware, you pay for what you use, not for who you trade with.
• No per-kilocharacter fees. I mean…what the heck is a kilocharacter anyway?

Why you might need a VAN

Tediware is built to let you trade directly with your partners over SFTP. SFTP is secure, lightweight and commonly used in many industries, such as logistics. You can provision your own SFTP connections (including in the free Developer plan) and start exchanging documents directly with your trading partners.

But not every partner will connect to you directly. In some industries, especially retail, companies only accept traffic through a VAN: the network of interconnected mailboxes that has been moving EDI documents since before the web existed.

Earlier this year a prospect wrote to me about a retailer whose EDI provider wouldn’t answer his emails about setting up SFTP. Despite it being listed in their “portal” (don’t get me started on “portals”) as a connectivity option, the reality was, the only option they supported was a VAN.

Until now, my answer to that was to point people at a third party. Now it’s integrated into Tediware.

Why Commport

Meagan Ralph Temple, Commport’s CEO, found my post about ingesting X12 implementation guides with an agentic pipeline, and connected with me on LinkedIn. Then she reshared it, calling it “one of the more practical applications of AI in EDI I’ve seen.” We got on a call and I really liked what I learned about her company.

Commport was founded in 1985 in Aurora, Ontario. It is family-owned, has never been sold, and has never been rolled up into something larger, which is unusual. Most VANs of that vintage have passed through private equity at least once, some of them several times, and never for the better.

Meagan was also willing to work with me on the pricing structure. I was previously negotiating with another VAN that charged by the kilocharacter, and wouldn’t budge when I told them I wanted my customers to have the same per-transaction pricing model that Tediware is already built around.

What’s changing in EDI

EDI integrations have traditionally been outsourced to managed services providers, consultants and specialists. After all, it’s undoubtedly complicated, and the only thing more expensive than hiring consultants is losing a customer because you messed up the trading relationship.

A large number of companies mandated into EDI by a customer take a path that is even worse - they log into a portal, print the purchase order, and key it into the ERP by hand.

There’s another, growing group: people with a good sense of how the relationship with their customers works (e.g. “they send a PO, we send an ASN”), some technical knowledge and experience, and access to a capable coding agent. They want to run their own EDI the way they run everything else.

Two years ago most of them wouldn’t have known where to start. Today, with AI doing the part that used to require a specialist, one of my customers described his setup as “breezing through it.”

This group is still a minority, but it’s growing, and Tediware exists to serve it.

Where Tediware and Commport fit

If you want your EDI integration handled for you, Commport will map your partners, manage your connections and run your traffic. They’ve been doing that since 1985 and they’re damn good at it.

On the other hand, if you want to own it, Tediware gives you and your coding agent the tools you need to build, test and deploy EDI integrations. Now, with the VAN add-on, that includes reaching partners who require that form of connectivity.

Tediware is building tools, not a team of integration specialists. Commport isn’t building a self-serve platform. Each of us does the part we’re good at.

Where this is heading

Connectivity is becoming something you subscribe to, like hosting or email. The interesting work in EDI is moving up the stack, to how integrations get built and who owns them when they’re done, and that’s where Tediware is focused.

Commport’s network, its history and its deep bench of talent help make that focus possible. I’m grateful for this partnership, and there’s more to come. For now, though, the add-on is live.

If you have questions about VAN service, or about whether you need one, email me at adrian@tediware.com.