394. Information technology is undergoing a fundamental shift from platform-centric computing to network-centric computing. Platform-centric computing emerged with the widespread proliferation of personal computers and the global business environment. These factors and related technologies have created the conditions for the emergence of network-centric computing. This shift from platform to network is what enables the more flexible and more dynamic network-centric operation. The shift from viewing partners as independent to viewing partners as part of a continuously adapting ecosystem fosters a rich information sharing environment.

395. This shift is most obvious in the explosive growth of the internet, intranets, and extranets. Internet users no doubt will recognize transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP), hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), hypertext markup language (HTML), Web browsers (such as Netscape Navigator, and Microsoft's Internet Explorer), search engines, and JavaTM Computing. These technologies, combined with high-volume, high-speed data access (enabled by the low-cost laser) and technologies for high-speed data networking (hubs and routers) have led to the emergence of network-centric computing. Information "content" now can be created, distributed, and easily exploited across the extremely heterogeneous global computing environment. The "power" or "payoff" of network-centric computing comes from information-intensive interactions between very large numbers of heterogeneous computational nodes in the network, where the network becomes the dynamic information grid established by interconnecting partners participating in a collaborative, coalition environment. At the structural level, network-centric warfare requires an operational architecture to enable the common processes to be shared by all parties.

396. The fabric for enabling net-centric operations is Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). SOA is enterprise architecture that leverages heterogeneity, and thus inherently platform-neutral. It is focused on the composition of Services into flexible processes and is more concerned with the Service interface and above (including composition metadata, security policy, and dynamic binding information), more so than what sits beneath the abstraction of the Service interface. SOA requires a different kind of platform, because runtime execution has different meanings within SOA. SOA is to enable business users and business process architects to compose Services into processes, and then manage and evolve those processes, in a declarative fashion. Runtime execution of such processes is therefore a metadata-centric operation of a different kind of platform --a Service-oriented composite application platform.

397. Network-centric warfare is characterized by new concepts of speed of command and self-synchronization.

398. The most important SOA within an enterprise is the one that links all its systems. Existing platforms can be wrapped or extended in order to participate in a wider SOA environment. NATO use of the NISP will provide a template for new systems development, as well as assist in defining the path for existing systems to migrate towards net-centric operations.