A Management Platform for Commercial Web Services

Abstract

Web Services offer the promise of allowing BT, along with its customers, partners and suppliers, to be able to assemble distributed applications that span multiple systems and organisations. The commercial drivers for this are cost reduction, new revenue opportunities and a better service through the use of automated end-to-end business processes. To achieve these benefits, BT will require a fully managed internal Web Services infrastructure. At the same time, creating a managed platform for our customers' Web Services deployments provides us with a new business opportunity. Early experience suggests that 20% of the effort in creating a commercial Web Services application is expended in defining the commercial opportunity, the service interfaces and server implementations. The remaining 80% is spent on ensuring that the operational and deployment environment is adequate to support business-grade service levels. Managing that 80% of the problem for our customers is a business opportunity for BT. This paper describes the requirements for a management platform for Web Services and then goes on to describe some of the value added business services that this platform can support.