Today, application integration is the single biggest challenge facing IT organizations. With business imperatives driving an increasing need for cross-organization integration, this challenge is getting ever more complex. XML Web services is a term referring to a set of related standards that enable program-to-program communication. Acceptance of these standards is a key step in changing the economics of executing loosely coupled application integration. As an industry, we need to reduce the time and expense required to enable organizations to work together. Achieving those efficiencies requires the kind of standardization we are currently seeing in the XML Web services initiatives.
IT managers see security as the single biggest obstacle to deploying XML Web services. For example, Business Week recently reported that a survey of IT managers found that 45.5 percent considered security their single biggest Web services concern.
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