Nigel Stokes

The holy grail of e-business and Internet technologies is the ability to enable cost-effective business-to-business transactions with trading partners eliminating the inefficiencies of paper trails, duplicate data processing, and rekeying of information. Companies are increasingly calling on IT departments to develop a network of relationships encompassing suppliers, business partners, and internal activities that is accessible, integrated, scalable, and resilient. To stay competitive, companies must be able to transform and exchange business data freely and dynamically between their own systems and those of their business partners via the Internet. This involves the integration of many different corporate databases, applications, Web sites, and business partners. Web services promise to provide a way to more easily and cost-effectively exchange, transform, and ac... (more)