Web Services
New Technology Directions
Web Services and Applications Development
VISTA's strategic plans for the company’s applications center on two areas:
- Employing new technology to address the inherent challenges in the way technologies, platforms, data models and applications currently cooperate.
- Ensuring that existing applications develop in parallel to the needs of our customer community, and developing new applications to address emerging customer needs.
Technology
Our technology strategy focuses on delivering applications that address the primary concerns identified by customers:
- Address the challenges of delivering digital products over the Internet.
- Leverage back-office applications.
- Allow internal and external customers automated self-service for routine business transactions.
- Provide a unified view of the data stored by publishing applications available to any application that needs it.
- Integrate and simplify multiple applications to reduce the number of human interactions needed to complete a business transaction.
- Incorporate third-party information into VISTA applications using web services.
Applications
From the applications perspective, the long-term benefit of VISTA’s architecture lies in mobilizing assets to deliver more value to customers. This strategy will allow an organization to bring to bear the maximum amount of knowledge inherent in its systems, organization and employees to better service customers.
The initial rollout of applications is in support of customer relationships, customer service and customer self-service via the web, with longer-term development in the area of author self-service and integration with digital rights and content management applications.
Within existing applications, new development is focused on developing functionality specific to the publishing industry, such as:
- More complex address structures and relationships, which will allow businesses to better deal with customer groups such as consortia
- More complex pricing structures and product combinations; for example, to deal with the issue of fragmented content delivered over the web
- New product identifiers, including the 13-digit ISBN, EAN and DOI
- More efficient processing of returns and visibility of this process throughout the supply chain.
For more information on our applications and technology development, please email solutions@vistacomp.com.
