Giving Legs to the Legacy — Web Services Integration Within the Enterprise

Behind the hype of Web Services (WS) is the reality of a sound and functional set of technologies for integration. This paper describes how the pragmatic use of WS technology has resulted in better, cheaper and faster integration for BT in its core operational support systems (OSS) system interfaces. BT has embarked upon a programme of enabling key components and middleware layers in its customer handling stack to leverage the benefits of Web Services in addressing the challenge of real-time heterogeneous interworking. It is believed that the WS-enabling of these legacy systems has helped add years to their productive use and protected the huge investment already made in these systems. As well as giving ‘legs’ to such legacy systems, Web Services support the drive to implement a service-oriented architecture inside BT and this paper investigates the ways in which this is being achieved. In order to exploit Web Services on BT's mission-critical platforms we have had to understand and work with WS issues on a wide range of platforms, proving the interoperability, performance and security of the new technologies in large-scale enterprise integration projects. Integration has been the first ‘killer application’ for Web Services and this paper will describe some of the business areas that have benefited from the cleaner integration that Web Services offer. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.