By Web Services Pipeline, InternetWeek
Aug 6, 2004

A research benchmarking study by Nemertes Research indicated that 75 percent of enterprises were using Web services to communicate with trading partners, customers, and suppliers. The study, "Extending the Enterprise" interviewed in-depth IT executives from 35 companies in a broad range of industries about their current "externalization" projects as well as planned initiatives. The firms were primarily mid- to large-size companies with annual revenues exceeding $500 million.

"We were primarily interested in how enterprises are externalizing the networks and building B2B and supply chain applications that reach outside the enterprise," said Andreas M. Antonopoulos, principal research analyst at Nemertes. Some of them were user-to-system applications, typically users using browsers to manipulate an internal application such as placing an order or seeing the status of a shipment, he said. Others were machine-to-machine interactions where internal applications talked directly to partner applications.

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