The continued attractiveness of EDI is mainly attributable to one fact: it works. It has developed into a near-perfect system, with many of the world's largest companies investing heavily in it over many years, despite its sometimes substantial implementation and maintenance costs.  As a result, vendors and customers that do business with those firms—from big-box retail stores to automobile manufacturers—also use EDI.

The EDI standards were designed from the beginning to be independent of lower-level technologies and can be transmitted using Internet protocols as well as private networks. It's important to differentiate between EDI documents and the methods for transmitting them. Communication protocols have come a long way since the bisynchronous 1200 baud modems, and although the use of value-added networks (VANS) continues, the migration to the Internet has broadened the reach of EDI, not reduced it.

The EDI documents themselves, as well as the traditional EDI service providers and standard development committees remain. As far as the EDI world is concerned, XML formatted documents are just another transaction exchanged between business partners.