Colin Evans

To understand what all the fuss about Web services is, it's useful to start with a little history. As Forrest Gump's mother said, "You can't look forward without putting the past behind you." So what have we all been doing this past decade? First, we've made massive investments in systems that automate our company business processes. Sometimes we have connected them internally and sometimes we've connected them externally to our trading partners; usually we haven't done much of either. It's just too hard to justify and build the custom connections required to integrate all systems given the mosaic of data and technology and processes that have to be joined. So we've taken the approach, "Hook up the important ones; we'll tackle the rest later." Second, we've obsessively embraced and exploited to an extraordinary degree the World Wide Web as an external layer to make o... (more)