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Web Services Within Enterprise Applications
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This white paper outlines the issues faced by BI operational staff in maintaining high quality of
BI information, and discusses technologies that have the potential to dramatically raise the
reliability and quality of BI information, improve how BI teams use their time and resources
to deliver rapid ROI and free resources to focus on answering business questions based on
reliable and meaningful data.
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Introduction
Enterprise applications have the potential to dramatically improve productivity, reduce costs, and increase efficiencies in both front- and back-office business units, including sales, customer service, marketing, manufacturing, engineering/design, accounting, and human-resource organizations. But to be truly effective, these applications need to present users with key information from their own data sources, as well as from related internal and external applications. Today’s ambitious enterprise application integration (EAI) projects, which aim to link applications by automating complex business processes, are years away from completion.
For many organizations, Web services offer a truly feasible alternative to these custom, lengthy and expensive EAI projects, by providing an open, standards based way to achieve interoperability and customization that is flexible and maintainable over time. Companies across an array of industries face the challenge of selecting the right Web Services Application Programming Interface (API) – to embed vital Information Delivery functions into their internal and external applications to establish flexible, standards based integration that is truly "future-proof."
Market Overview
“As Web services start to infiltrate enterprise IT projects, the versatility of this technology is becoming increasingly clear. Web services are fulfilling their potential as low-risk, high-utility data integration catalysts, but they are also emerging in unusual, visionary projects.”
— Gartner Group, August 2002
The 1990s could well become known as the "decade of the enterprise application." Enterprise applications – including enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and sales force automation (SFA) applications – have become primary levers employed by corporations to increase revenues, implement cost savings, enhance efficiencies and improve productivity. But as companies deployed systems from SAP and Peoplesoft for their back-office operations and Oracle and Siebel for their front-office, they have often focused on gathering information – ensuring, for example, that customer data is collected from every customer "touch-point," from call center to Web interface to email contact. By contrast, delivering information by the aggregation, analysis, reporting, and sharing of critical enterprise data has often been an afterthought. And so Information Delivery applications have been layered on top of enterprise applications or implemented as standalone "point" applications that perform specific reporting functions such as quarterly revenue reporting and monthly inventory analysis.
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