E-Services: Current Technology and Open Issues

The Internet changes the way business is conducted. It provides an affordable and easy way to link companies with their incorporating trading and distribution partners as well as customers. However, the Internet’s potential is jeopardized by the rising digital anarchy: closed markets that cannot use each other’s services; incompatible applications and frameworks that cannot interoperate or build upon each other; difficulties in exchanging business data; lack of highly available servers and secure communication. One solution to these problems is a new paradigm for e-business in which a rich array of modular electronic services (called e-services) is accessible by virtually anyone and any device. This new paradigm is currently the focus of the efforts of many researchers and software vendors. This paper presents the e-services architecture, its advantages as opposed to today’s applications and gives an overview of evolving standards. It then presents the related technical challenges, the way some of them are addressed by existing technology and the remaining open issues.