10.1 Business scenario

< Day Day Up >

In this scenario, we focus on the intra-enterprise interaction between the Retail and Wholesale departments. Introducing the IBM Web Services Gateway provides ABC Electronics with a number of advantages:

Central access point for all services inside the enterprise

The gateway provides a single, well-known point to access Web services within the enterprise.
Decoupling the deployment of Web services from clients

The gateway isolates any changes in the deployment of services within the enterprise from consumers of the services. The location of services also becomes transparent to clients of the service.
Central security control point

Access control can be applied to Web services so only authorized clients are allowed to access services.
Protocol conversion between Web service requesters and providers

Access to the services of applications that use protocols other then HTTP is planned for the near future. Therefore, access to the Web services has to be open for different protocols.

We also look at using the Web Services Gateway in an inter-enterprise integration scenario in Chapter 14, "Using inter-enterprise Web services" on page 299.

< Day Day Up >