Today, you might phone or fax a supplier to order bike parts, or you might visit the supplier's Web site. With Web services, the applications you use to track inventory would gain enough smarts to know that you were low on bike parts. Under EDI, we use proprietary data formats and private network connections to perform similar functions. Small businesses have a hard time complying with the requirements of EDI, which calls for many resources to support the creation of EDI documents and integrate them with business applications. In short, EDI works for larger companies, but is a real pain for smaller businesses.
Web services promises to level the playing field.
Another is the relative dearth of tools yet available to begin implementing Web Services. This situation, however, should change over the next 18 to 24 months. In particular, keep an eye on the emerging ebXML standard . Recently approved, it leverages truly open standards to support secure application-level data exchange. Be wary of SOAP and UDDI, however, as these standards leverage extensions to proprietary technologies.