| Nobody can dispute the incredible impact that the Web continues to have on the way in which people work, shop, research, play, and communicate. In the span of just a few short years, enterprises in nearly every industry and market have had to reevaluate the way in which they do business with their business partners and end customers. Having a presence on the Web has become an absolute necessity for large and small enterprises alike. But a mere Web presence in the form of online “brochure-ware” is not enough. Enterprises must provide their business partners and end customers with advanced services through their Web sites. Examples abound and include home banking, package tracking, order entry, order status inquiry, and other customer services. It is quickly becoming an accepted notion that businesses without a Web strategy will cease to exist within a few short years.
The incredible challenge facing IT management is how to provide these advanced services in the face of flat budgets, scarce labor, and Y2K upgrades. Because the advanced Web-based services tap into the operational heart of the enterprise, it is imperative that IT management leverages the existing, mission-critical applications and data. There is neither the time nor the budget to rewrite and port everything to Web servers. IT staff must integrate the existing systems with new, burgeoning corporate intranets being developed.
Web-to-host integration is the most pressing, but equally the most rewarding, challenge facing IT professionals around the world. Web-to-host integration permits the proven, mission-critical data center systems and applications to be seamlessly and synergistically assimilated with Internet technology-based networks and Web server-based information infrastructures. Web-to-host integration permits PC, Apple Mac, and workstation users to effortlessly access data center applications and databases via a standard Web browser such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer — across the global Internet, a corporate-specific intranet, or a business-to-business extranet. Web-to-host integration also permits data resident on legacy systems to be easily incorporated into highly visual, multimedia Web pages that also happen to include data from other sources — including Web servers. |
