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Services easily understood
To Brad Murphy the "buzz" surrounding
Web Services has missed the bigger story of business
agility. " It's about a new, emerging class
of tools that make it possible for a business
manager to creatively model and design new marketplace
offerings and/or enhance existing offerings without
the constant reliance on costly, dedicated IT
resources. This potential is why Web Services
is resonating so well with the business community.
For the first time we're offering them an opportunity
to work with tools and raw material that translate
the technology into a context they instinctively
understand - products and automated business process
expressed as services, not technology or software.
"For the last several decades, those managers
who are running the business have increasingly
become dependent on highly skilled IT staff. This
dependency has resulted in the business staff
losing any ability to directly affect how customers,
partners and employees are served. Even the smallest
change in the delivery of products or services
generally requires the intervention of scarce,
highly skilled technical professionals. As a result,
the rate of business innovation has slowed to
a crawl.
To turn new ideas into real products and services
involves increasingly expensive deployment resources
that take months and sometimes years to fully
implement and integrate. "Too often the result
of this circumstance is the increasing difficulty
in building and maintaining a clear brand distinction.
As a result, companies today are looking more
and more alike…Web Services changes all that,"
explains Brad.
With a well-designed and constructed Web Service
application infrastructure, companies will be
equipped to change, alter and launch new applications
and services quickly and easily. Additionally,
these new applications and services will dynamically
integrate and collaborate with both existing and
future systems with little cost, effort or time
required. Web Services will also act as a key
enabler in future tools that provide the business
user a context in which to experiment and create
new, innovative ways to repackage their products
and services to meet new needs.
Great opportunity for Valtech
"Valtech is well positioned today to provide
the kind of leadership and vision customers need
in order to make sense of Web Services. We have
a huge service opportunity if we focus on delivering
well-designed architectures and integration infrastructure
incorporating this important development. If our
work embraces the layers of the Web Services stack
that are fully mature (XML, SOAP and UDDI) while
providing flexibility for those protocols still
emerging (WSFL, UDDI, WS-I, etc.) we have the
potential to fundamentally change the way our
customers compete in the future" explains
Brad.
Most analyst surveys today indicate that the
typical enterprise spends between 40-60% of it's
application development budget on integrating
existing systems. Unfortunately, the conventional
approach to integration today (proprietary EAI
messaging, adapters, etc.) generally yields a
solution designed to solve a very narrow set of
business challenges. Rarely do these solutions
prove flexible enough to accommodate future needs
without a great deal of costly re-works later.
"The good news is that this trend represents
a significant opportunity for Valtech. By helping
clients discover and implement an agile, services
oriented infrastructure (one business problem
domain at a time), we make it possible for our
clients to go after small, but potentially lucrative
markets before they become obvious to their competitors.
So while lowering integration costs for clients
is clearly an important short-term client goal,
for Valtech, Web Services vision and leadership
represents an opportunity to define and build
business tools and infrastructure that will empower
our clients to innovate, compete and deliver products
and services like never before." Brad ends.
Read also : Web services
: a new opportunity for Valtech
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Brad Murphy was President, CEO, Chairman and
founder of digitalESP, Inc., a leading US based
B2B business web infrastructure and integration
firm for Fortune 1000 companies that Valtech acquired
earlier this year. Brad spearheads new partnerships
and he works closely with clients to identify
strategic opportunities for Valtech in the US.
Brad is uniquely qualified to talk about this
and other technology issues. He has worked with
many customers in developing their Web Services
capabilities to build bridges between complex
internal systems that would otherwise require
extensive development efforts and in addition
Brad represents Valtech on IBM's newly initiated
Web Services on WebSphere (WOW) Advisory committee,
as one of only 25 companies invited to assist
IBM in shaping its Web Services strategy and WebSphere
initiatives.
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