Leveraging Web Services : Planning Building and Integration for Maximum Impact

Leveraging Web Services shows you how to harness the power of Web Services and realize a quantum leap in productivity and bottom-line results. A web service is any type of application that can "talk" to any other over a network, exchanging information about what the application does and what it would like the other applications to do. Your business places its chosen application (for example, contact databases or supply chain software) in an online directory, and other applications in the same directory can then access and use the information to perform their own functions- in real time and with little or no human involvement. It presents eleven informal, highly readable profiles of organizations that have successfully implemented Web Services to meet various objectives. Each one has discovered how to leverage Web services to significantly accelerate application development and ease business-to-business integration. Whether you're an IT manager seeking to make the case for Web services or an executive eager to profit from the next wave of technology advancement, Leveraging Web Services will bring you up to speed and give you dozens of ideas for applying this exciting new technology within your own organization. This book helps senior executives and managers understand how their businesses can profit from the devleopment and application of Web services. It uses case studies and interviews to take readers inside organizations that have applied this new technology, both internally and with customers, suppliers, and business partners.