Chapter Summary

A walk through today's Web services landscape reveals several very interesting ways to make use of Web services to increase business revenue, foster systems interoperability, reach new customers, and reduce software development costs. It should also be noted, though, that no good examples were found of enterprises that are using Web services to dramatically expand their applications portfolio. Nor were examples found of the use of Web services to create and rapidly counteract competitive pressure. One is left to conclude that Web services applications are still in the experimental, nonmainstream phase of evolution.

Still, a close look at the anecdotes presented in this chapter shows that Web services are now being used to repackage existing ISV applications in order to make them more appealing to prospective buyers. And Web services applications can indeed be used to foster interoperability between dissimilar, disparate systems platforms and databases. Further, Web services can be used to reduce SG&A costs both by reducing manual processing tasks and by making it possible to sell products without having a direct or indirect sales force aggressively "pushing" solutions to market.

An illustrative example on the personalization front was Microsoft's .NET My Services product suite. Other personalized Web services, too, are being brought to market. For instance, Sun and a number of its business partners recently announced the "Liberty Alliance" in order to provide automated password and credit card services to consumers. (This alliance has been designed to compete with Microsoft's "Passport" functionality.) Most suppliers of application server platforms provide software tools that allow applications to be personalized for use by consumers. In other words, although Microsoft's .NET Alerts were illustrated in this chapter, other vendors are also active in the personalized Web services arena.

Dozens of excellent examples on various Web sites prove that Web services really do work and that they can be applied in many ways to help organizations and individuals achieve their particular goals. The shortfall is that few public UDDI directories exist and this prevents many ISVs from effectively marketing their products and services. Overall, however, a walk through the dozens and dozens of Web services Web sites, and talks with Web services users, suggest that Web services may indeed have the "traction" to become the distributed computing standard that many IS managers and business executives have long been waiting for.