Web Services and SOA

Technology is changing at a rapid pace and this is easily evident in the adoption of web services and service oriented architecture by the leading business package vendors. With the advent of Service orientation in the application designing, the business world will not remain the same. The live era described by Bill Gates[Business Week] is surely on its way.

Many will agree that the isolated, disparate, multi-technology applications in Organizations lack the capability of presenting the consolidated view of global business. The merger and acquisitions add to the complexities of the situation. Whenever an acquisition happens, the acquirer wants a quick streamlining of organizations for better visibility and growth.
Add to this, the complexities of offshoring,outsourcing and complex supply chain. Now, the CIO of a company has a mess and he has the job of getting maximum productivity from the existing system. A lot of investment has already gone into this system , so he cannot completely replace the system. This is where web services come in.

Web Services provide an ability to expose specific reusable business functions on the internet. These web services can then be discovered by the consumers and can be used by different organizations located across the globe. Web Services provide a mechanism for machine to machine interaction. The web services can be implemented .Net, J2EE and other technologies, but the web service definition, messaging and publishing has been standardised by W3C, microsoft , IBM and other leading technology company. If every implementation of web services sticks to the defined standards, the number of web services will increase dramatically and infact, organizations can purchase the already deployed web services instead of going for self implementation.