What is enterprise web?

Answer 1

What is the Enterprise Web?

The Enterprise Web is an open environment for managing and delivering Web

applications. The Enterprise Web combines services from different vendors in a

technology layer that spans rival platforms and business systems, creating a

foundation for building applications at lower cost. This foundation consists of the

services most commonly used by Web applications, including business integration, collaboration, content management, identity management and search, which work together via Web services. The portal is the delivery framework for applications created from this foundation.

The result is an environment that spans the entire enterprise, open to all platforms, and available to all audiences. Providing a common foundation for Web applications built on any platform lowers infrastructure and development costs; integrating resources from different systems into Web applications increases the return on those systems; and creating a common user experience for audiences across.

Enterprise Web Benefits

The Enterprise Web addresses the most basic challenges faced,

• Lower development costs: How to integrate Web technologies to create a

common foundation for Web applications, lowering development costs;

• Return on investment: How to overcome client-server incompatibilities

between Java, Windows and legacy systems, maximizing the return on

investments in existing systems;

• Enterprise productivity: How to create on the Web a working environment

for the enterprise that complements the working environment for the

individual offered by Windows, driving enterprise productivity; and

• Customer, employee, partner service: How to build initiatives for

employees, customers and partners using many of the same electronic

resources, offering improved service to all at lower cost.

The companies first promoting the Enterprise Web vision may or may not be the

ultimate leaders in the market for Enterprise Web technologies. But customer

demand for an enterprise-wide Web environment for bringing together different

types of systems and people is indisputable. With the advent of Web services and the race to integrate rival technologies, the change has already begun.

This change represents the ultimate cooperation of software vendors for the benefit of customers: whereas in the beginning one vendor controlled the software and the hardware that people used to run their business, today customers have the flexibility to deploy different systems on different platforms, empowering users to fashion their own environments on the Web from all of these resources.

This kind of freedom is irrevocable. Software will never be the same.