Beyond the corporate firewall: web services enable data sharing
Buoyed up by the opportunity to easily and safely share data with customers and partners, IT departments are increasingly taking internal applications and data outside their corporate firewalls in the form of web services.
For example, The District of Columbia in the US will soon go live with a new system that uses web services to help emergency command centres in Washington DC and surrounding areas coordinate responses in the event of natural disasters and terrorist attacks.
The system, called CapStat, is being built on an SOA (service-oriented architecture) that uses web services to allow command centres in five jurisdictions in Washington, Virginia and Maryland to exchange essential information.