Companies today need to go “beyond integration,” beyond merely enabling applications within a network to talk to one another, to “building services that enable (companies) to take advantage of their existing assets and put those assets together into new applications more easily, renovate and reuse those assets, migrate and consolidate where multiple platforms are becoming more expensive, and reduce costs,” says IONA Technologies CTO Eric Newcomer.

In the ebizQ webinar Using Web Services to Build Mission-Critical Integration Solutions, part of the Reducing Complexity and Cost Through Standards-Based Integration series, Newcomer noted numerous enablers of intra-network/inter-application communication, such as CORBA, J2EE, .Net and proprietary solutions.

“In fact,” Newcomer pointed out, “IONA customers say there are too many solutions for that problem, and what they seek now is a way to reconcile all those different solutions and provide a common way of accessing, a common way of turning all of those different platforms and different middleware into services that can be put together very easily but not lose any of the qualities and features that they have been used to in mission-critical systems.”

So, he says, IONA is “moving as a company toward the standardization of software, toward the use of standardized Service Oriented Architectures based on Web services and XML, and using the power of those new technologies, to drive down costs while improving the results of the integration effort” through its new Artix product line.

Standardization is important, Newcomer observed, because, “Companies simply cannot afford to spend as much on software in the future as they are today and they cannot afford to keep specialized and dedicated IT staff to the extent that they are required to today. We see the industry move to standardization as inevitable as a result of those economical forces and pressures.”

Toward that end, “Everybody is using Web services. Everybody is adopting them and building products conforming to Web services, which gives a lot of credence and a lot of hope to the idea that Web services will contribute to, if not really finally succeed, at standardizing the software industry.”