One of the primary goals of IT is to provide business insight. The “vertical silo” applications we’ve built in the past provided this insight in the context of a single business—but today’s world doesn’t run in the vacuum a single business. Today your business needs to integrate with business partners, customers, and other organizations within your internal infrastructure.
A key way today to offer this inter-business, cross-platform integration is with Service Oriented Architectures and Web services. In the last couple of years, the acronym SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), has gone from being an ambiguous buzzword to being a key part of your data integration strategies. With ASNA Visual RPG and Microsoft .NET, you can publish and consume industry standard SOAP and RESTful Web services using your System i data and processes with whomever you need—in a secure, flexible, and predictable manner.