Companies need to be able to start small, and then leverage that success and investment to improve the rest of the company. The good news for the business is that the technologies and standards that address these issues are mature enough that companies can begin to take advantage of them. What the big software vendors recognize is that these advances, and the effect they have on business, are inevitable. The reason for this is that business drives technology, not vice versa. That s worth saying again.
Business drives technology.
Technology does not drive business. The effect of this is that Microsoft, Sun, HP, IBM, Oracle and all the other big boys are forced to scramble in order to get to the market with their new strategy first. In order to understand why the majors cannot afford to give enterprise customers the best solution, we must first make sense of the puzzle. Web services are merely business logic functions that were traditionally made available through a specific software application, like Credit Check, either individually or as a group of applications presented as a single function. The difference is that these application functions are beginning to be defined according to their business purpose, and how they work is transparent to the user and other applications that use them.