The Challenge
Getting the right information to flow easily and predictably to consumers is not always easy. And weakness in this area means greater difficulties in acquiring – and retaining – customers. Integrating systems across your organization is one way to create new functional opportunities; if you want to improve customer acquisition and retention, it means creating a richer customer experience. Internally, it allows information about customer activities and trends to flow to decision makers while the window of opportunity is still open to act on it.
Infogain Solution
Web Services is one of the simplest sets of standardized technology available today that allows for enterprise-wide system integration. It describes a set of modular applications or "services" that can be accessed within a network (e.g., the Internet, an intranet, or extranet) through a standard interface, typically XML.
By using open, platform-independent standards and a universal language and framework, Web Service-based solutions assist you in integrating disparate systems. With Web Services, the definition, description, and publication of a service are enabled such that any number of systems can use a single interface to interact with it. And with a service-oriented architecture and the freedom to choose best-of-breed HR, ERP, SFA, supply chain, CRM, and application server solutions, expanding and streamlining take less time.
Standards-Based Solutions
Web Services relies on two core standards - SOAP and XML - to accomplish one goal: provide platform-independent venues of service-oriented interoperability. HTTP, another standard, is the transport protocol of choice for Web Services. Although it's not a required protocol, it’s what put the "Web" in Web Services and remains the most common choice for those creating a service-enabled enterprise today.
Web Services specifies both a standard method for describing a service (WSDL, or Web Services Description Language) and one for publishing its availability for other service-enabled consumers (UDDI, or Universal Discovery, Description, and Integration). By combining the two, you can efficiently integrate with partner and customer systems without the need for point-to-point integration.
This means that you can apply solutions in areas that have been generally avoided due to multi-party dependencies, lack of knowledge, budget limitations, or insufficient time. It also means breaking down some key barriers to information flow – and that’s good for business.
Business Benefits
Web Services technology is a fairly new and rapidly growing paradigm in systems integration. There are critics of Web Services who may complain of under whelming capabilities by pointing to a lack of encryption, security, transactions, and context; or the use of stateless protocols and an inability to ensure quality of service. Yet intermediaries can provide "missing" functionality without being integral to the architecture of Web Services – thus maintaining its simplicity.
Infogain helps you determine if Web Services is the right solution for your enterprise. With established relationships with vendors such as BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, PeopleSoft, and Siebel, Infogain brings the open architecture of Web Services to all kinds of businesses – not just high-tech – to increase operational efficiency without relying on proprietary systems or products.
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