XML White Papers

Web Services: Enabling the Collaborative Enterprise

• Tags:
• xml,
• collaborative,
• business processes,
• enterprises

Overview Companies must either partner, or perish, in today's challenging environment. There is an imperative to transform the "collaborative enterprise" from a buzzword into a reality. This will require a new technology architecture that makes integration much less difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. Current software solutions deployed on the edges of enterprises are expensive, do not scale, and are complex to implement across enterprises.

Web services are an emerging technology architecture that could make integration as easy as plugging an appliance into the electrical grid. Collaborating enterprises will be able to plug applications and business processes into a service grid that is ubiquitously accessible and affordable to most companies. Web services are designed to enable a collaborative environment that is decentralized, dynamic, and diverse. This emerging architecture will enable companies to reap unprecedented productivity rewards from a more focused and integrated set of business processes and partners. Indeed, machine-to-machine execution of loosely coupled business processes by enterprises and their partners will touch every company, customer, and employee. It will redefine enterprises, and even industries, by facilitating agility.

This is not a utopian vision based on vaporware. Web services are becoming available and can be piloted by companies with relatively little incremental investment in time, money, or new information technology. Many of the key elements of the architecture are quickly coming to market through application platforms from IBM, BEA, Sun and Microsoft. In addition, the industry is coalescing around standards such as XML, SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL. However, a shared integration infrastructure is also required to cost-effectively manage complexity. Grand Central is pioneering this new element of the Web services architecture with a Web Services Network. It enables enterprises to quickly integrate more simply, securely, scalably

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