Web Services vs. ebXML

Web services and ebXML are modern integration technologies that represent the latest developments in the line of middleware technologies and business-related integration paradigms, respectively. In this chapter, we discuss relevant aspects of the two technologies and compare their capabilities from an e-business point of view.

Service Portfolio Measurment (SPM)

This chapter addresses service-oriented information systems from a management perspective. It is evident that running a service-oriented enterprise brings up new challenges for management. Given the technological opportunities, the challenge lies essentially in choosing the right mix of services on the basis of an appropriate architecture. For this purpose, strategic considerations regarding, for example, the company’s flexibility have to be justified by financial performance measures. This is particularly evident as long-term economic consequences result from decisions on the service portfolio. Thus, evidence is required about the fact that these decisions are in alignment with the company’s financial situation. The total costs of ownership (TCO) caused by a particular service-oriented information system, as well as the return on investment (ROI) gained by it, give examples for appropriate financial performance measures. In this chapter, a measurement system is presented that facilitates the assessment of the various financial consequences within a comprehensive framework. The system is grounded in decision theory and capital budgeting, and it is illustrated by its application within practical examples.

Information Technology as a Service

In this information era, both business and living communities are truly IT driven and service oriented. As the globalization of the world economy accelerates with the fast advance of networking and computing technologies, IT plays a more and more critical role in assuring real-time collaborations for delivering needs across the world. Nowadays, world-class enterprises are eagerly embracing service-led business models aimed at creating highly profitable service-oriented businesses. They take advantage of their own years of experience and unique marketing, engineering, and application expertise and shift gears toward creating superior outcomes to best meet their customers’ needs in order to stay competitive. IT has been considered as one of the high-value services areas. In this chapter, the discussion will focus on IT as a service. We present IT development, research, and outsourcing as a knowledge service; on the other hand, we argue that IT as a service helps enterprises align their business operations, workforce, and technologies to maximize their profits by continuously improving their performance. Numerous research and development aspects of service-enterprise engineering from a business perspective will be briefly explored, and then computing methodologies and technologies to enable adaptive enterprise service computing in support of service-enterprise engineering will be simply studied and analyzed. Finally, future development and research avenues in this emerging interdisciplinary field will also be highlighted.

Concepts and Operations of Two Research Projects on Web Services and Context at Zayed University

This chapter presents two research projects applying context in Web services. A Web service is an accessible application that other applications and humans can discover and invoke to satisfy multiple needs. While much of the work on Web services has up to now focused on low-level standards for publishing, discovering, and triggering Web services, several arguments back the importance of making Web services aware of their context. In the ConCWS project, the focus is on using context during Web-services composition, and in the ConPWS project, the focus is on using context during Web-services personalization. In both projects, various concepts are used such as software agents, conversations, and policies. For instance, software agents engage in conversations with their peers to agree on the Web services that participate in a composition. Agents’ engagements are regulated using policies.

Best Practices in Leveraging E-Business Technologies to Achieve Business Agility

This chapter explains the best practice in implementing e-business Technologies to achieve business cost reduction and business agility. Many companies started to realize that gaining competitive advantage is no longer feasible by only managing their own organizations; it also requires getting involved in the management of all upstream supply organizations as well as the downstream network. E-business technologies present huge opportunities that are already being tapped by several companies and supply chains. Although the benefits of implementing e-business technologies are clear, enterprises struggle in integrating e-business technologies into supply-chain operations. The author illustrates the strategic and operational impact of e-business technologies on supply chains and explains the performance benefits and challenges firms should expect in implementing these technologies. Also, the author provides the best-practice framework in leveraging e-business applications to support process improvements in order to eliminate non-value-added activities and provide real-time visibility and velocity for the supply chain. Finally, this chapter presents the future trends of using e-business in transformation programs.

Designing Enterprise Applications Using Model-Driven Service-Oriented Architectures

This chapter aims at characterizing the concepts that underlie a model-driven service-oriented approach to the design of enterprise applications. Enterprise applications are subject to continuous change and adaptation since they are meant to support the dynamic arrangement of the business processes of an enterprise. Service-oriented computing (SOC) promises to deliver the methods and technologies to facilitate the development and maintenance of enterprise applications. The model-driven architecture (MDA), fostered by the Object Management Group (OMG), is increasingly gaining support as an approach to manage system and software complexity in distributed-application design. Service-oriented computing and the MDA have some common goals; namely, they both strive to facilitate the development and maintenance of distributed enterprise applications, although they achieve these goals in different ways. This chapter discusses a combination of these approaches and discusses the benefits of this combination.

Leveraging Pervasive and Ubiquitous Service Computing

The advancement of technologies to connect people and objects anywhere has provided many opportunities for enterprises. This chapter will review the different wireless networking technologies and mobile devices that have been developed, and discuss how they can help organizations better bridge the gap between their employees or customers and the information they need. The chapter will also discuss the promising application areas and human-computer interaction modes in the pervasive computing world, and propose a service-oriented architecture to better support such applications and interactions.

Data Replication Strategies in Wide-Area Distributed Systems

Effective data management in today’s competitive enterprise environment is an important issue. Data is information, and information is knowledge. Hence, fast and effective access to data is very important. Replication is one widely accepted phenomenon in distributed environments, where data is stored at more than one site for performance and reliability reasons. Applications and architectures of distributed computing have changed drastically during the last decade, and so have replication protocols. Different replication protocols may be suitable for different applications. In this chapter, we present a survey of replication algorithms for different distributed storage and content-management systems including distributed database-management systems, service-oriented data grids, peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, and storage area networks. We discuss the replication algorithms of more recent architectures, data grids and P2P systems, in detail. We briefly discuss replication in storage area networks and on the Internet.

A Composite Application Model for Building Enterprise Information Systems in a Connected World

The Web, as a ubiquitous distributed computing platform, has changed dramatically the way we build information systems, evolving from monolithic applications to an open model that enables real-time and federated information access, unifying the user experience across business processes. The industry has coined a new term for this latest evolution: connected systems. Unlike distributed systems, they are not just about distributing workload or ensuring fail-over, but rather about leveraging connectivity to enable specialized software agents to perform units of work cooperatively and opportunistically by exposing and consuming each other’s services to fulfill a common goal. To reach their fullest benefits, connected systems require a new application model that relies exclusively on the consumption and composition of autonomous services. This new blueprint is poised to reshape the information systems’ architecture, infrastructure, delivery technologies, programming languages, deployment, and management models. The goal of this chapter is to help you understand why and how IT should evolve the enterprise architecture toward a service-oriented composite application model.

Requirements Engineering for Integrating the Enterprise

In an era of global economy, an enterprise must demonstrate agility in order to stay competitive. Agility requires continuous monitoring of the ever-changing business landscape and quick adaptation to that change. Often times, this means businesses must merge to form strategic partnerships allowing them to provide new products and services. Such partnerships create the need for critical information to flow seamlessly across the newly formed enterprise and be available on demand for effective collaboration and decision making. However, the legacy business information systems that each partner brings into the newly formed enterprise typically have a very narrow focus serving the needs of a single business unit within an enterprise. As such, it becomes necessary to integrate multiple different systems before the right information can be delivered to the right person at the right time. Integrating disparate systems from a technical perspective is not hard to achieve since the Webservices standard is fairly mature and provides an open infrastructure for software systems to interoperate. One must, however, first understand the need and level of cooperation and collaboration among the different segments of an enterprise, its suppliers, and its customers in order for this integration to be effective. This chapter motivates the need for model-driven requirements engineering for enterprise integration, reviews the research to date on model-driven requirements engineering, and examines a case study on integrating health-care providers to form integrated health networks to gain insight into challenges and issues.