Web services key to company success
Web services key to company success
Gartner has warned that organisations risk their future by ignoring the importance of Web services, which can help companies achieve better agility, increased competitiveness and higher responsiveness to client demands.
Gartner analyst, Dion Wiggins, said that Web services are part of a bigger technology picture in which organisations must rethink their IT structure and begin to build a Service-Oriented Architecture.
Banks and other financial institutions have been quick to incorporate Web services and a Service-Oriented Architecture, but others have been very slow at getting into the groove.
Wiggins also said. "In the past, IT systems were built to last, but that philosophy must change. Now, they need to be built to change, enabling business agility. Technology must no longer conform to the rules of the IT department but to the demands of business.
"By 2007, SOA will be mainstream in Global 2000 companies, and government will be moving in the same direction, albeit more slowly. Those who are using Web services and building an SOA today will have a competitive advantage in terms of cost efficiency and the time required to respond to client demands.
"As SOA becomes mainstream in 2008, enterprises that have not acted will be at a strategic disadvantage to their competitors because their IT systems will not adapt quickly enough to the changing needs of the business and their clients."
Gartner added that organisations that try to integrate new services run into difficulties that could be avoided if they built systems designed for interoperability. This is because interoperability involves building an infrastructure capable of handling all technologies and applications, even the unknown.
Vendors such as Oracle and SAP are in the process of moving their products towards an SOA environment, as part of a push to make their technology more powerful to the business.
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