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.
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... |
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.
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.