SHARE

Microsoft: Web Services is About Business Agility

NEW YORK — With Web services beginning to gain acceptance in the business world, Microsoft came to InternetWorld Fall 2002 Tuesday to refine its message: beyond just integration, Web services are about providing “business agility.” Success in business is often a matter of flexibility, of being able to respond to shifting market demands rapidly and […]

Written By

Thor Olavsrud

Oct 1, 2002

Datamation content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More

NEW YORK — With Web services beginning to gain
acceptance in the business world, Microsoft
came to InternetWorld Fall 2002 Tuesday
to refine its message: beyond just integration, Web
services are about providing “business agility.”

Success in business is often a matter of flexibility,
of being able to respond to shifting market demands
rapidly and capitalize on opportunities. But while IT
is often seen as a solution to the need for
flexibility, the cost of updating IT infrastructure to
pounce on changing trends can be prohibitive.

“Historically, IT has been run as a cost center,”
Charles Fitzgerald, general manager of Platform
Strategies at Microsoft, told the assembled crowd
Tuesday morning. But the possibilities engendered by
XML Web services can change that, Fitzgerald said, by
allowing organizations to rethink IT priorities.

Enabling business agility is a matter of connecting
with customers and partners, empowering employees,
streamlining business processes and optimizing IT
economics, Fitzgerald said. XML Web services touch
upon each of those areas by providing an Internet
native mechanism that allows different systems to
communicate with each other.

Fitzgerald was armed with a handful of examples,
including Pitney Bowes, which has used Web services to
integrate package pricing across shippers, or
Scotiabank, which does business with many automobile
dealers and used Web services to provide those dealers
access to legacy systems. Other examples include Vail
Resorts, which used the technology to integrate six
different CRM systems, and The University of Texas MD
Anderson Cancer Center, which integrated its patient
information systems with a $200,000 investment that is
estimated to save it $30 million over eight years.

“We really think the marketplace has validated Web
services both from a technology perspective and a
business perspective,” Fitzgerald said.

But Fitzgerald noted that the revolution may be
waiting in Web services ability to deal with business
processes.

“Businesses tend to think in terms of the business
process,” he said. However, historically, businesses
have been forced to change their businesses processes
in order to conform to the needs of their technology.
With Web services, Fitzgerald said, the opportunity
now exists to create technology that serves business
processes.

Part of the answer to doing that rests with Business
Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS),
developed jointly by Microsoft, IBM and BEA Systems
and released in July.

“It allows you to describe business processes
independent of the underlying system,” Fitzgerald
said.

BPEL4WS defines a model and a grammar for describing
the behavior of a business process based on
interactions between the process and its partners.

Beyond that, Fitzgerald said Web services is also
about giving organizations the ability to “unlock
information and get it out to the people that make
decisions.”

As an example of how Microsoft itself is using its
.NET Web services strategy to do just that, and
provide organizations with “business agility,”
Fitzgerald pointed to Microsoft Office XP, which he
described as a “socket for plugging into Web
services.”

Office XP features analysis and collaboration tools
that turn users into consumers of Web services. For
instance, Excel features a new “My Data” menu which
allows users to pull spreadsheet data through Web
services. On the other end, developers can create
defined roles to various sets of users, allowing them
to tailor the way end users access information to the
needs of the specific roles.

Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: Driving Greater Equality

FEATURE | By James Maguire,
December 16, 2020
AI vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning

FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
December 11, 2020
Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think

FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
December 04, 2020
Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 18, 2020
Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA

FEATURE | By Guest Author,
November 10, 2020
Top 10 AIOps Companies

FEATURE | By Samuel Greengard,
November 05, 2020
What is Text Analysis?

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 02, 2020
How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 29, 2020
Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 23, 2020
The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media

FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
October 16, 2020
Top 10 Chatbot Platforms

FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
October 07, 2020
Finding a Career Path in AI

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
October 05, 2020
CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science

FEATURE | By Guest Author,
September 25, 2020
Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future

FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 25, 2020
Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2021

FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
September 22, 2020
NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
September 18, 2020
Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 14, 2020
Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 13, 2020
IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI

FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 11, 2020
Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality

FEATURE | By James Maguire,
September 09, 2020

SEE ALL
ARTICLES

Thor Olavsrud

Thor Olavsrud is a journalist covering data analytics, security, infrastructure, and networking for CIO.com. He's especially interested in companies that use data to transform their business to tackle problems in innovative ways. As a senior writer, his articles focus on practical insights, analysis, and business use cases that can help CIOs and other IT leaders navigate the shifting IT landscape.

Microsoft: Web Services is About Business Agility

Thor Olavsrud

Recommended for you...

Company

Categories

Microsoft: Web Services is About Business Agility

RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Thor Olavsrud

Recommended for you...

Company

Categories