Nancy Esposito

Like most companies, you want to streamline your business, automate manual processes, and expose key functionality to partners and customers. And like most companies, you probably have a mixture of applications and hardware - some new, some old. Your customer information may reside in a database, but you rely heavily on an AS400 green-screen system for critical business functionality. Other important business functions may be accessible via COM APIs or even as Web services. Without question, integrating these disparate applications and data sources is among your biggest challenges. There certainly is a lot of hype saying that Web services will provide a cheap and easy solution to this type of integration challenge. Yet Gartner estimates that $1 billion will be wasted on misguided Web service projects by 2007. How much of this will be yours? Striving for a Business ... (more)