The Practical Side of Web Services: Missing Pieces for Enterprise Deployment

Introduction
What has history taught us? With every new technology it becomes fashionable in the early stage to build the hype. Web Services is no exception. There is widespread media, vendor and consultant hype that the next generation of business applications -- customer-facing, inter-company or intra-company -- will be developed and deployed in form of modular services that are offered on-demand over the Web. The promise of Web services for a IT manager is simple: the ability to build useful composite applications by aggregating the services of many other modular services that exist locally or remotely on the network, in a company's intranet or across the Internet. The promised of Web Services for the business executive is a little fuzzier: make it easier for corporations to meet customers, suppliers and channel partners demands.

The intrinsic pain that Web Services are aiming to solve is flexibility and faster integration. These are the technical foundations of every company's business strategy, which increasingly is focused on managing internal business model change and process integration simultaneously. Change and integration are widely recognized as the organizing principles by executives who know they can't build their strategies, structures, and systems on the old assumption of continuity or status quo. To meet the challenges of discontinuity and react to the markets, a corporation must learn to change without losing control of operations.

Solving the application integration problem to provide seamless operations both within and across organizational boundaries is the central theme of Web Services. Why is integration such as big deal? As enterprise applications grow in scale and scope, making them work together in the context of a large-scale business process, e.g., supply chain, becomes increasingly difficult for IT organizations. Integration becomes even more complex as businesses extend their applications over the Internet to customers, employees and partners.

At a vision level, Web Services describe the ability to integrate and provide information, data, services and applications to anyone, anytime, anywhere on any device. At the execution level, it is not quite that easy to do. While Web services is a promising approach aimed at solving a number of issues in the software world, the current state of Web services standards and specifications are yet to fully address a number of pragmatic software issues that are important in order to deploy mission critical applications as Web services.

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