Web Service Based ERP App?

[precisonline]

I've been giving a lot of thought to the future of application software, especially ERP applications like those we've been supporting for the past dozen years or so.   Have you ever just sat and pondered what these applications might look like 5 years from now?

Looking into my crystal ball (well, it's a coffee cup, but go with me on this) I could see a web service architecture becoming a viable platform for a dynamic, scalable, and global solution.  But I'm not talking about a WSA as one might envision today.  Rather than leveraging WSAs as adjuncts to existing solutions, I could see the WSA becoming THE foundation for the next generation of applications.  I mean hey, Google, Yahoo, and Amazon (et al) are spending vast amounts of coin on this whole cloud concept, so what's stopping us from taking the same kind of architecture and applying it to our day-to-day business solutions?

Think about it, someone wants to order something so we open up a http conversation and ask the computer to check stock.  Assuming we have the stock we send in another transaction that says to ship that stock to Bob over in Scranton.  The computer then makes its own WSA calls and determines that there's stock in Los Angeles, Dallas, and New York, so let's ship from the New York warehouse 'cause it's closest.

From the smallest of tasks to the largest of operations, breaking everything into digestable and easily formed web calls creates an amazingly scalable infrastructure that could lend great power to the next generation of business applications.  Most importantly, it removes a mountain of technical complexity from the puzzle, allowing us to truly write something once - beit a tax calculation or a fulfillment algorithm or anything else one can dream - and be able to use it in a global commercial context.

Once we start to view the web as a first class technology - i.e. the transport layer for distributed object computing - all sorts of cool opportunities become available.  What do YOU think?

[rcoop]

I like your idea.  In fact we're kinda of doing something similar to what you describe.  We have global customers who place orders through a book seller, we have a webservices that request orders from the book seller, once we retrieve the orders we turn them into our native erp systems orders.  We send a response back to the book seller after the order is created,  This all happens in seconds.  Once the order is created the customer can then track it through our backoffice system, UV.