|
Future Enterprise- Web Services 2.0 |
|
|
Globalisation, increasing automation and growth of e-business, are all driving the growth of the service economy. In turn the service economy is driving the growth of web-based services across the internet.
Major productivity increases are now being seen in most industries due to the automation and streamlining of traditional processes. The continuing challenge is the capture and encapsulation of knowledge from the physical processes, enabled by advances in the ICT and modeling sciences and creating intellectual property assets that can generate ongoing value for the enterprise.
Web sevices are emerging as a major technology for deploying automated interactions between distributed and heterogeneous applications and for connecting business processes which might span companies' boundaries. Industry is beginning to embrace web services and service value networks because of their productivity and flexibility potential. A vast array of business services are now provided over the internet and account for 80% of enterprise economic activity.
But already a new player in the Web Services space is emerging- Web Services 2.0
Over the last few years the Web 2.0 'mashup concept' has emerged as a way to create new web applications. Now the next phase of Web Service development is about to explode - Web Service 2.0 mashups- combining existing Web Service technologies with Web 2.0 collaborative content as well as Semantic Web and AI advances.
A web service is an application that can be accessed and implemented online and is largely independent of a particular computing platform or software model. Routine service functions are converted into codified computable processes with clearly defined rules for execution, using the new Service Oriented Architecture-SOA and web service standards such as WDSL, UDDI and SOAP.
Traditionally, applications have been delivered piecemeal. This has resulted in a higher total cost of ownership (TCO) for the company as a whole, increasing IT costs, but not delivering optimal gains for the business. The overall aim is to reduce costs by re-using the knowledge assets of an enterprise and also to increase flexibility by reducing the time to implement a new service. This has led enterprises to adopt a service oriented architecture- SOA which allows re-use of functional assets in applications and enables quicker and easier system integration.
In the longer term SOA / Web Service standards will allow virtualisation and decoupling of software and business process components within a service-oriented framework, making software updates transparent and automatic. Overall such a framework can increase flexibility and the speed of deployment, while also reducing the cost of implementation through consolidation and reuse.
Web services are also ideal for allowing developers to adapt core Enterprise Resource Planning-ERP systems to fast-changing business processes. They can be orchestrated to create multi-service business processes that connect via a SOA to a robust, reliable back-end, adding easy-to-use functionality.
Future Trends
The Web Service paradigm will allow the enterprise of the future to be more responsive to an ever-changing social and economic environment and to do so at a lower cost than traditional approaches. This will accelerate an increasing dependence on the automatic delivery and maintenance of services, driven by innovative semantic and artificial intelligence methods, combined with flexible Web-based delivery and distribution. New IT architectures and development strategies beyond SOAs will therefore need to evolve in the future, to keep pace with such a web service–enabled economy.
In addition, as technology offers consumers access to vastly more information and choices, the quality of service delivery will also become increasingly important, with customer satisfaction paramount. Service orientation will therefore dramatically impact the competitiveness of business organisations, accelerating the redesign of system and software architectures towards a more networked and smarter Web services 2.0 orientation. .
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. |
