Greg Reinacker: Web Services Get Traction in Real World
"I’ve worked with multiple clients using web services… including a multi-billion dollar travel services company, who have built and deployed web services (can’t deep link, click on "Galileo Web Services") for their customers to use. With these services, they can get a new customer up in hours or days, rather than the weeks or months that it took previously. And they have unprecedented monitoring and control capabilities, and the ability to protect their legacy systems in a new way by encapsulating much of the old error-prone logic.
I’ve also worked with clients of these particular web services, and it’s even better from their perspective. No more screen scraping; no more wading through a 500-page manual of structured field specs; and no more waiting for months for a private data line to be installed. And even better, there are higher-level services provided to easily accomplish certain travel tasks that used to be very complex. We’re talking about weeks of development, reduced to a couple of days."