Today, companies are reducing the cost of integration by using Web Services to solve point-to-point integration problems inside the enterprise. However, the most important business value of Web Services lies not with the creation and deployment of individual Services themselves, but the new approaches to architecting IT infrastructures that they herald. These new architectures are loosely coupled, standards-based and Service-oriented. In such architectures, software functionality is exposed as business-oriented Services in a way that decouples the Service from the underlying software. The systems and applications that provide the Service are transparent to the systems that consume the Service.Companies that adopt such architectures will have information technology infrastructures that provide the flexibility necessary to enable them to leverage changing business environments to their best advantage. To move from simple, point-to-point integration to Service-oriented architectures, however, calls for a new approach to managing the software within an organization, known as Web Services Management. With Web Services Management, companies can build and support enterprise-class Service-oriented architectures that enable true business agility.
