Web Services Explained, Solutions and Applications for the Real World

This chapter focused on how Web services can be used in a variety of business and personal settings to provide efficiencies, to reduce costs, and to deliver other benefits to businesses and individuals. What may be the most important message in this chapter was stated very briefly:

This statement should not be taken lightly. As illustrated in the generic examples in this chapter, Web services enable businesses to do the following:

• Rapidly open new markets by making use of external Web services to rapidly assemble application portfolios in order to enter new markets.

• Reduce development costs by making better use of object code that resided internal or external to the organization.

• Streamline operations using Web services combined with business process management software that some vendors now make part-and-parcel of their Web services platform offerings. This streamlining had the result of reducing a business's sales/general/administrative (SG&A) costs thereby adding greatly to bottom-line profitability.

• Overcome competitive pressure (or create it against competitors) by using Web services protocols and directories to automatically find potential business partners, negotiate services and prices, integrate the service offering into the originator's portfolio and thus quickly expand an enterprise's application offerings.

• Create new revenue streams by rebuilding existing applications into Web services. By offering nonstrategic applications to the general computer marketplace as services, a company may be able to increase its revenue stream with very little additional programming or administrative effort. And the resulting revenue stream amounts to "found money" revenue that has been garnered by doing little more than finding a new way to make use of existing intellectual capital.

• Better serve or penetrate existing markets by overcoming obstacles related to traditional product packaging. The Web services model has real potential to upset the traditional packaged-software sales approach used by most independent software vendors. Web services offers potential buyers new options, such as purchasing software as a subscription service hosted by a third-party or by the software vendor itself. Using this model, ISVs that previously had trouble getting users to buy their products because "the IS department is not willing to install and support a given software package" suddenly have a new option sell directly to the end-users and offer their products as hosted-elsewhere services.

• Overcome system/network interoperability issues. By using Web services, developers can focus more on making applications work together, regardless of underlying infrastructure or platform/language issues. In most cases, users will be completely unaware that services are being provided by cooperating disparate back-end systems all they will see is the data that they requested being delivered to them in a transparent fashion.

Web services enable businesses to move from a scenario where all applications have to be controlled in-house to a more flexible one where best-of-breed applications can be easily incorporated into the businesses primary application portfolio creating opportunities for the business to run more efficiently and to adjust to changing competitive and market conditions more nimbly. In other words, by changing the way that applications are designed and developed, business will be made more flexible and efficient. And, as exemplified above, Web services have the potential to alter the fundamental competitive basis for businesses.

The other aspect of Web services described in this chapter has to do with their use to improve personal productivity. In the examples presented, heavy use was made of the messaging services elements of Web services architecture. But messaging is only one of dozens of ways in which Web services will be used to help improve individual productivity in the future. You need to think of personalized Web services as a virtual assistant program. People will be able to automate various elements of their personal lives by having a virtual assistant program find specific informational and data services on the Web and providing the requested information on a specified device within specified timeframes.

Literally tens of thousands of applications are candidates for becoming Web services. Once business realizes the strategic, competitive, or efficiency value of using a Web services approach in application design and deployment, these applications and tens of thousands more will ultimately become Web services enabled.