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Dot Net Services

A stronger Microsoft than we've seen recently is already moving into the future. We're very interested (and learning more each day) in the area the company refers to as "Dot Net Services". (If you want to get really confused, try to absorb some of the information in Microsoft's website about Dot Net Development). Essentially (and, again, we are still learning), Dot Net is a set of services that allow databases to talk to each other built on SOAP and XML protocols. Again, the intensity of the jargon belies the fact that Dot Net allows communications through a simple set of relationships.

The toughest (and most expensive) part of doing business for today's multi-service vendors (enterprise companies, JADs and ATS providers with complex point of sale offerings) is the cost of integrating and maintaining the changing streams of data from partners, customers and other sources. Some companies have designed themselves to handle the chore in an extremely manual way that forces them to overlook the very real legal issues. The detailed attention required by manual processes is so overwhelming that the big picture is continually lost by companies like CareerCast. A business built on manual data configuration management will always lose out to the next wave of automation.

If it's true for the vendors, it's even truer for customers. Faced with solutions that claim to be end to end but are really just the vendor's favored alliance partners, many customers are forced to develop their own in-house data integration solutions to "supplement" the vendor's offering. Dot Net claims to ease their workload as well, eventually reducing the dependence on single point vendors in favor of perfectly customized solutions.

In addition, the dot net approach allows fast search without reliance on the big search engines that currently drive large applications. It is becoming clear that a technical strategy that relies on Microsoft is a guarantee of lower development costs and higher reliability.

As we said at the outset, we don't know as much about "dot net" as we'd like to. In the coming weeks, we'll be doing more research (as a component of our 2002 Electronic Recruiting Index). Stay tuned.

- John Sumser © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.