How can the enterprise further take advantage of web services? According to Frank Martinez, the answer is to use them as fundamental building blocks and tie them together with XML-based declarations of how they work together.

In this Technometria interview with Phil Windley, the Blue Titan Software CTO describes how Blue Titan "infuses application semantics into the network," in the process up-ending the current model: rather than web services being something that applications do to talk to each other, applications become web service providers to the network. To re-work the old Sun slogan: the network is the application platform.

As companies migrate from traditional monolithic software architectures to what Frank calls immersive service based computing, infrastructure is required to declare and enforce policies on transaction handling, services, and security that were previously hard-coded into individual applications. Blue Titan acts as the glue and policy engine that binds together the components of the distributed enterprise.

Frank and Phil discuss the transition of enterprise use of the web from the static "heritage web" through simple live content to the emergent class of collaborative web applications; how developers should approach, select and deploy web standards according to their simplicity and ubiquity; and the case study of Pfizer's migration to a service based infrastructure.

Editorial note: Enterprise middleware being in some respects the nuclear physics of distributed software environments, anyone not already familiar with the middleware's industry jargon might wish to seek a lighter introduction to the subject. Software programmers, on the other hand, might be fascinated how terminology and techniques with which they're familiar programming within a particular application or environment can be applied to glue together disparate applications and environments at the enterprise level.

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Frank Martinez is the CTO, Chairman and Co-founder of Blue Titan Software. Frank was recently named an InfoWorld Innovator and has also been named one of 25 leading IT innovators by CRN. A recognized expert in the area of distributed, enterprise application and infrastructure platforms, Frank is driving development of scalable service-oriented infrastructure software that integrates business processes and information enterprise-wide.

Resources:

• Blue Titan Software
• Wikipedia entry: middleware
• Wikipedia entry: web service

For Team ITC:

• Description editor: Garth Kidd
• Post-production audio engineer: Paul Figgiani