Why use a VAN? A lot of organizations are tempted to do everything on their own and manage connections with various trading parties. Not only can this get quite tedious to maintain, but the hidden costs are often more important than perceived.  Managing AS2 or FTP bridges with customers or suppliers involves hardware and software acquisition and maintenance cost as well as your own internal staff’s time to install, monitor, maintain, debug and fix problems on the equipment and software.  Your IT staff probably has enough balls in the air to avoid overloading them with another bag of daily tasks. This is why the world of VANs was created; to facilitate connections and avoid undue pressure on key internal resources.  InterTrade has been in business for more than 15 years as a VAN and currently allows more than 25,000 trading partners to transport business documents over its network. VANs are expensive – why bother? As much as some industry pundits like to say this is true, the reality is that VAN prices have gone down to a fraction of what they were just 5 to 10 years ago.  Today, the cost of using a VAN is cheaper than buying an AS2 license and maintaining a connection with a trading partner.   InterTrade offers starting packages that are extremely attractive from a financial perspective. Moreover, VAN networks are already interconnected to one another, so that setting up a connection with one of your trading partners on the InterTrade network or on any other VAN network takes very little time.  Easier, faster, cheaper; InterTrade’s VAN is the way to go to comply to your customers and to deploy rapidly to your business community. How do I go about it? Getting set up on the VAN is easy.  Actually, your involvement is to basically tell InterTrade who you want connected and we will do what it takes to get your partners lined up.  InterTrade is a specialist at outsourcing EDI functions including the VAN portion.   Whether you have an existing portfolio of connections through another VAN that you want to port over to InterTrade or you are new to EDI, InterTrade has the expertise to handhold you through the process and make it work. As a Tier-1 VAN, we are connected to all major North American networks and we will find a way to establish a secure, reliable link to your trading partner.  With InterTrade, VAN connections are made easy. How do I get an access to a VAN? Once you have made the decision to start working with a trading partner via EDI, you will want to get it as quickly as possible. Every day you have to wait for your EDI solution is another day of losing money. Our goal is to save you time and money, and so we make your business our top priority. We guarantee to set your EDI business up as quickly as possible. Our Engineers are EDI experts with knowledge in all aspects of electronic data exchange. We have ready-to-ship EDI Solutions that can help you start doing business. Over the years we have developed EDI solutions to fit every type of business. Our goal is always to set companies up with EDI painlessly.