Aligning Applications With Client Services

A recent report by analyst firm Yankee Group predicts that the next swing of the pendulum between centralized and decentralized applications will soon align with a new concept called client services.

According to the report, “The Next Generation Web: Locally Empowered Applications,” those new tools will take advantage of both rich clients and Web services to create intelligent applications that offer enhanced functionality on the client side while still acknowledging the benefits of centralizing certain components.

Neal Goldman, Yankee’s director for application infrastructure and software platforms, likens the arrangement to how modern companies function, with remote offices being responsible for a variety of local tasks but certain operations referred to the central organization for processing.

The report also notes that Web services, such as Microsoft’s .Net, is a logical piece of the client services puzzle. “.Net is about having smart clients talking to smart servers using Web services as the communications infrastructure,” Goldman says.

For more information regarding the report, visit www.yankeegroup.com.