Advertisment

What’s the Buzzword?

author-image
DQI Bureau
New Update

A few years ago, when the industry buzzword "Java"

hit the streets, it was hyped to solve all the ills of the software industry.

Java has since proven to be an extremely useful and successful programming

language and application platform. Later, the hype was about another novel term

XML. Like Java, XML has been proven to be very successful. Today, the buzzword

is Web services. Java, XML, and Web services as mighty trinities have

significant potential to do great things for e-business.

Advertisment

The concept of e-business is a transformation of the economy

that is just emerging from infancy. The first generation of e-business, which

has been around for nearly five years, has largely been about taking existing

relationships, business processes and applications and making them accessible

through the Internet. It has been a user-driven medium. The capability is just

starting to emerge that will enable business processes (a.k.a. applications) to

navigate, discover and interact with other applications via the open standards

of the Internet. It falls under the banner of Web services.

Web services is a standards-based approach to integrating

applications running across distributed servers that are connected via an

Intranet, Extranet, or the Internet. Web services provide the means to do it

easily, more securely, and without the complexity of writing a custom interface

for each application. The resulting business solutions are integrated both

within the enterprise and beyond the firewall with customers and partners.

Web services are representative of the confluence of technology and adherence to open standards, factors that will enable e-biz’s future success...

Advertisment

Web services represent the confluence of technology and

adherence to open standards that will enable e-business success. Simply put,

businesses will be able to re-engineer their applications and business processes

and become more proactive in the way they take advantage of this dynamic nature.

IBM calls this transformation dynamic e-business, a key

enabler of which is Web services. Dynamic e-business is the result of

re-engineered business processes that are Internet-savvy from the beginning and

are, therefore, inherently dynamic. Its value will be more profound than the

first generation of e-business based on simple enablement of access to existing

applications that were not supercharged for the Internet.

Key to the success of dynamic e-business as well as a Web

service is the adoption of open standards in the Internet that support these

capabilities in a manner that is vendor-neutral and widely supported. IBM’s

philosophy is to cooperate on open standards and compete on implementations. For

instance, if a business needs to purchase pencils, a human buyer plugs in a URL

that sends them to a site, which presents an HTML document that allows them to

navigate to the specified site, say officeExample.com, to make the purchase. The

end user drives the transaction.

Advertisment

The alternative consists of creating heavy-duty

business-to-business interaction between your own business and a select number

of business partners. Because of the complexity of this type of application

integration, it is quite often only justifiable for core processes, and with

well-defined business partners.

Web services will now help provide that capability, and

change the pencil-buying scenario a great deal. Under this new e-business model,

a purchasing application can be programmed to perform a number of functions that

act on behalf of the purchaser. This application, acting on a buyer’s behalf,

goes out, queries all other applicable companies, and obtains the right results.

There’s no being tied to a single supplier, and it keeps the buyer aware of

the best possible deal.

It’s accomplished without special arrangements with the

application provider and it provides much greater opportunity on both sides of

the transactions, not to mention lower costs. Web services are doing for

applications what the Internet has already provided humans – the ability to

navigate, discover and interact with resources over the standards of the

Internet.

Pawan Sharma is country

manager for software group and developer relations at IBM India.

Advertisment