What is a Web Service?

Most use of the Internet involves a person sitting at a browser (such as Internet Explorer) and looking at web pages. This doesn't have to be the only way though. Computers can talk to other computers using the internet, and thus exchange information without the need for human intervention. There has been a great deal of hype about web services, and how they might transform business. This is partially because of a powerful feature whereby each web service publishes its own "instruction booklet", telling other systems how to talk to it. This means that one business' systems can potentially (subject of course to security permissions) talk to another business' systems without their respective IT departments having to negotiate specifications. Of course it isn't quite as simple as that, but that is the hype.

Irrespective of the hype, the technologies developed to support web services can be used very effectively to help solve the more everyday interconnectivity problems of all businesses.

  How your business can benefit

One example of a solution that Whitespace have implemented using this technique, is for an insurance intermediary who wanted to speed up their quote-to-cover cycle for the legion of agents promoting their products. They already had an online quotation and proposal form system, but found that whilst this worked well for agents sitting in their offices, it was no help when they made personal visits to clients using laptops.

Our client now has a web service which accepts prepared insurance proposals, and passes them through to their back-office system. The agents use a quotation and proposal form system which operates on a standalone basis on a laptop while they visit their clients, and then connects to the web service to download the newly prepared proposals once they are back in their offices.

The engine behind your business

There are many ways in which the ease of connectivity offered by web service technology can improve efficiency and the ease of doing business - and thus, ultimately, the quality of the service you offer to your customers.

If it would be helpful for a system in one place to be able to talk to or exchange information with another system elsewhere, web services can provide a very cost effective way of achieving that result.

Would I need new hardware or software?

One of the benefits of web services is that the technology has been designed to work on almost any platform and is also freely available on the Internet. If you already have a web server that has the capacity to deal with the increased flow of traffic then you will probably not need to buy anything new. You would use free technologies called SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) that between them send secure information across the Internet from program to program.

How can I find out more?

We would be delighted to talk to you to explore how you might benefit from web services, on an entirely no obligation basis.

For more information please call Whitespace marketing on 020 7240 0208 Alternatively, you can email us with your request at jonathan.ling@whitespace.co.uk.