LoginLogic » Philosophy » eBusiness
Collaboration, accessibility, eCommerce, and globalisation are common threads for eBusiness. eBusiness aims to achieve a realtime service level.

The report below is presented in completeness, including illustrations:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/i-ebodov

eBusiness evolves in phases. In each phase, the Internet transforms the business processes:

1. Access to digital information. This phase is all about publishing content, most of it of the static "look-up" variety. Simple database queries allow us to check a bank account, look up airline flight information, or see where our overnight package is. It's pretty easy to get in the game here. All an enterprise needs is a home page. All an individual needs is a browser.

2. Real transactions, real eBusiness. Don't just look at your bank account, move some money. Don't just check a flight departure time, book your seat... Doing this requires more than a Web site, this requires behind-the-scenes integration of technologies and business processes.

3. Advanced stage of eBusiness. In a fluid system of customer, suppliers, partners, and employees, the Internet is the primary way to communicate, transact, and connect. Business processes shift from manual to automated. A relationship could last only as long as a single transaction. The environment is real-time computing. You form networked communities...

The eBusiness technology roadmap

A. Open standards and Java*: You don't want to rip and replace. Instead, you want to link together your disparate, distributed, heterogeneous systems, and you can do this using open standards. You can use open standards to ease your integration burden and tie new products and technologies into your existing infrastructure easily and at low cost.

B. Linux: Why choose Linux? First, it's reliable, scalable, and secure. It's an enterprise-quality operating system, and you can trust Linux with your enterprise applications because it's a stable and mature base. Second, Linux is about the lowest-cost alternative on the market... It's easy to migrate your code from UNIX to Linux... Plus, the applications you write for Linux can run on any platform. You can choose the server that's right for the application instead of the application that's right for the server... Finally, Linux provides an open, standards-based application platform, especially when combined with J2EE and Web services.

C. Web services: Web services focuses on simple, Internet-based standards to address heterogeneous distributed computing. Applications designed within a Web services architecture can seek each other out, integrate, and execute transactions, all in an automated fashion... A manufacturer could automatically connect with the supplier that best meets its cost and technical demands, while that supplier in turn could connect automatically with manufacturers that have similar needs.

D. Grid computing: A grid is a collection of distributed computing resources available over a network that appear to an end user or application as one large virtual computing system. A grid can span locations, organizations, machine architectures, and software boundaries to provide unlimited power, collaboration, and information access to everyone connected to the grid.

E. Autonomic computing: Autonomic computing systems are self-configuring, able to adapt to dynamically changing environments; self-healing, able to discover, diagnose, and act to prevent disruptions; self-optimizing, able to tune resources and balance workloads to maximize use of IT resource; and self-protecting, able to anticipate, detect, identify, and protect against attacks.

F. Utility computing: The concept of e-sourcing is simple. It's Information Technology as a utility. Think of electricity, or telephone service. You don't need a generator to get electricity to your home or office. You just plug into the electrical grid, use what you need, and pay for what you use... Where's the data center? It's in the enterprise. It's outside the enterprise. Or it's shared between them. It doesn't matter where, because the infrastructure becomes a pool of resources available on demand.

Add them together. You have applications and systems integrated using open standards. Plus Web services that provide definitions, discovery, and access to self-managing, autonomic IT resources on a grid. And what do you get? You get computing resources capable of being shared globally and managed end-to-end. You get an infrastructure that's incredibly flexible and that will allow new capabilities to be deployed with relative ease. This is the technical environment on which an on-demand enterprise depends.