54 Enterprise Business Portals II with IBM Tivoli Access Manager
3.1 General business environment
What the Web did for program-to-user interactions, Web Services are poised to
do for program-to-program interactions. Web Services allow companies to
reduce the cost of doing e-business, to deploy solutions faster, and to open up
new opportunities. The key to reaching this new horizon is a common
program-to-program communications model, built on existing and emerging
standards such as HTTP, Extensible Markup Language (XML), Simple Object
Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and
Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI).
Web Services allow applications to be integrated more rapidly, easily, and less