Network-centric architecture to enable secure communications and discovery

In organizations today there exists an amplified need for increased integration and collaboration within and across organizational boundaries. With the emergence of Web service technologies, has come a significant architectural shift in service oriented architectures (SOA). Built on pervasive technologies such as HTTP and XML, Web Services has the potential to gain broad adoption over its predecessors such as DCOM and CORBA and has the support of industry leaders such as Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, and IBM. Web Services technology is well positioned to become the primary solution for business integration and collaboration problems due to its decentralized, loosely coupled, and highly interoperable architecture. This highly interoperable architecture allows Web Services to be consumed and built using any development technology that supports the simple object access protocol (SOAP), the foundation of Web services communications. However, securing and utilizing Web services within a SOA introduces new obstacles that cannot be fully addressed by existing information technology (IT) solutions.