Technology leaders have high expectations that Web services will meet a broad variety of goals -- everything from cross-enterprise integration to reducing development costs -- and their desire to explore is keen, according to our 2001 InfoWorld Web Services Survey. But except for some early rudimentary adoption, little practical application of Web services is yet in circulation.
Web services hold great promise for bringing businesses and their applications together, but many of the integration particulars remain murky. As a result, CTOs are questioning the potential of Web services and, as our 2001 InfoWorld Web Services Survey indicates, their XML implementations have been slow to get off the ground.
Good business requires that employees and customers both have easy access to information. Implementing today's Internet-based tools and devices, however, isn't always the most effective or convenient way to accomplish the task. To better assure access to your company's vital data, IBM has enhanced the WebSphere e-business platform with the release of WebSphere Voice Server 1.5, dramatically improving the thin-client capabilities of a standard telephone.
In the ongoing battle to attract and retain customers online, more businesses are turning to site personalisation to deliver dynamic, relevant content that can be tailored to enrich user experience. The process, however, can quickly bring servers to their knees.
The Internet's second coming, the one based on wireless Internet availability, appears to have come and gone. Lauded as the next, best hope for tapping new consumer-side revenue streams, business-to-consumer wireless services stalled out when they proved difficult and impractical to use. Nevertheless, wireless is far from being relegated to the technology trash heap.
The swell of attention garnered by Internet-based initiatives such as collaborative commerce and services-oriented architectures left ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendors scrambling for the rudder last year.
As today's e-businesses applications become increasingly datacentric, storage always seems in short supply.
In the midst of an economic cooling, it can be pretty difficult to justify updating an existing commerce infrastructure. Nevertheless, IBM Corp.'s WebSphere Commerce Suite Pro 5.1 delivers a solid vehicle for broadening revenue streams by leading global e-initiatives out of the stateside doldrums and across the big blue seas.
I've returned from a recent set of roundtable discussions in which several retail clients heatedly discussed the migration of existing EDI (electronic data interchange) systems to XML-based alternatives. After intense discussion, I found that the number of proponents of the idea was roughly equal to the number of its detractors.
One of the slowest technological areas to advance has been the means by which we interact with our computers. Inherited typewriter-based metaphors have prevailed as the most familiar, although often most impractical, means of interaction. GUIs offer users a friendlier interface than a stark DOS command line, but often introduce a new set of tribulations.
Moore's law, named after Intel cofounder Gordon Moore, states that the silicon-data density on a chip doubles every 18 months.
There is no denying that leveraging the Internet to streamline corporate business processes has resulted in dramatic gains, introducing efficiencies in both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions. Most of today's e-business implementations, however, are little more than automation extensions of traditional processes: hard-wired relationships and corporate partnerships forged to meet a common but predefined goal. For the moment, Hewlett-Packard is closest to delivering on the e-services promise.
The e-business expansion is bringing with it a wave of automated information exchange, delivering a wealth of cost-saving benefits to the enterprise but leaving a wake of new security risks in the process.
Although business risks are nothing new, the Internet poses some unique challenges for securing the well-being of corporate data assets, particularly when forging external business relationships. With greater numbers of access points into proprietary data streams, the supply-chain gateway quickly becomes one of the weakest links in the privacy chain.
When it comes to e-business, you can't take anything for granted. Once upon a time, improving your bottom line simply meant streamlining the integration among your partners and business processes. Nowadays it also means doing a better job of assessing and fulfilling your customers' demands.
he Y2K glitch - and the many potential vulnerabilities it introduced - convinced IT managers of the growing importance of security in the enterprise. And as more companies turn to e-commerce, they'll need a solid, large-scale security system. If you hope to foster a successful electronic-business climate in 2000, one in which business partners and customers will want to participate, you must create and ensure end-to-end trust across online transactions. With a public key infrastructure (PKI) solution, you can bolster your security efforts through data encryption, digital signatures, and authenticated transactions.