Service Grids: The Missing Link in Web Services
John Hagel, John Seely Brown · 2002
Service grids are a critical architectural component required to realize the business potential of Web services. Without the emergence and evolution of robust service grids, Web services technologies will remain relatively marginal, especially in terms of supporting inter-enterprise connections. As our other working paper “Break on Through to the Other Side” suggests, much of the earliest potential impact of Web services is concentrated at the edge of the enterprise. Without service grids, this potential will largely be unrealized. In spite of the importance of service grids, all the attention of technology vendors and pundits remains focused on two other layers of the Web services architecture – the foundation standards and protocols and the application services ultimately enabled by these standards and protocols. Service grids truly have become a critical missing link in Web services.