The Changing Enterprise

From a business perspective it is important to understand how the enterprise has been impacted by new technologies around economical, scalable computing -- an emerging new standard for connecting and integrating over the internet.

First there is the virtual enterprise. In today’s business climate there is an increasing virtualization of businesses as companies focus more on their core competencies and seek to outsource the rest. This changes the competitive environment as it is no longer a company competing against a company -- rather a supply chain competing against another supply chain.

Then there is the empowered organization. To compete effectively in this current climate organizations need access to up-to-the minute information regardless of where that information originates and lives, and regardless of where the employee is located. Smart organizations need smart devices, not just simple access to information; they need the capacity to be able to act on that information.

Finally there is the connected customer. Customers are demanding more responsiveness, better service and better access to information. We need to be able to provide them what they want -- when they want it -- on a worldwide basis 24 by 7.

These are the business drivers in the new economy: to remain at a competitive advantage, businesses must be able to:

1. Reduce cycle times
2. Integrate input across the whole business to make better decisions faster
3. Quickly respond to customers to build loyalty and repeat business

While this defines the agile organization, IBS has focused on delivering the software that facilitates agile systems:

Agile systems must be of enterprise class scale and performance. They must also be reliable, highly available, and manageable.
Agile systems must provide a faster time to market and be tailorable for your specific business needs.
And they must not only automate business processes, they must empower the right people in your organization to be responsive and make the best decisions.

The “Virtual” enterprise –Best of breed/best of business partnerships

In today's business climate, there is an increasing "virtualization" of businesses as companies focus more on their core-competencies and seek to outsource the rest (fulfillment, payroll, customer service, etc.). Outsourcing can lead to reduced costs, increased service and ultimately greater profitability. One of the key enablers of an outsourcing model is the increasing use of the internet for business to business communications and transactions -a move away from proprietary, expensive, hard wired EDI based solutions.

Companies today are looking for a "best of breed/best of business" strategy for their partnership outsourcing strategy. Successful companies in a today’s Economy can leverage "plug and play" partnerships as market conditions dictate. That means choosing the best partners to meet the current market requirements. Partnership decisions are ideally made based on value to the business, not limited to only working with "like" partners who have the same applications, the same operating system or the same hardware. The key challenge for these companies then becomes integration, both inside the firewall (how do I integrate my "best of breed" applications?), and outside (how do I integrate with my partners, my suppliers, my organization and my customers?).

Transaction and business processing occurring over the internet

One factor that significantly reduces the cost of doing business with virtual partners is the use of the internet for data transfer and business processing. Unlike leased line and EDI based propriety data exchange, the Internet provides a lower cost alternative for connecting business processes. Given that the connective "wire" between these various entities is the Internet, there needs to be a native internet based integration methodology that is platform neutral, language neutral, and application neutral. One that enables maximal interoperability and minimal integration costs. One that essentially assumes integration will occur as opposed to treating it as an afterthought. Enter Web Services, the emerging standard for internet based distributed application integration.

Information Empowerment

In order to effectively compete in today’s business climate, organizations must have access to up to the minute information about the business, regardless of where the information originates or lives, and regardless of where that employee may be situated (geographic, mobile, etc). Beyond simple “access” to information, smart organizations need smart devices (as opposed to “dumb” terminals/devices) and have the capacity to act on that information.

The increasing trend toward outsourcing services combined with the requirement that even distributed information (customer order status, sales information, part availability, etc.) be accessible and actionable calls for a method for integrating that assumes the internet as the connective wire. That is to say, business in Today’s Economy requires a computing model that supports and enables distributed, loosely coupled relationships within and across organizational boundaries. And since those relationships are “connected” via the internet, any computing model for integration must be web based. Over the past three years, the industry has begun to standardize around a key methodology for distributed, web based integration called “web services.”