But one of its most significant impacts is its part in the evolution of new supply chains that are emerging in the enterprise.

"Employment of social supply chain sourcing and advanced B2B supply chain services that can be activated and harnessed in real-time to solve problems and meet challenges dynamically and effectively. Today's Web APIs, which are directly made successful by the developer communities that make them up, will be transformed into enterprise social supply chains made up of partner communities and novel new network coordination systems."

In Hinchcliffe's view, the social supply chain is starting to replace existing supply chain networks. Until quite recently, supply chains advanced through technological improvements. Now, cloud computing and open API's are providing organizations with new ways to get real-time data into the enterprise.

The foundation for this new supply chain are systems built upon a Web Oriented Architecture (WOA). According to Hinchcliffe, this environment is moving Web technologies and the Internet itself to the center of enterprise supply chains.

Hinchcliffe:

"The Internet version of all these trends could be said to have culminated in recent years in the concept of the mashup. These are products or services created entirely out of the components of other businesses and where ingenuity and insight are the single most important ingredients. In this world of on-demand supplier integration, the primary supply chain inputs of mashups usually are usually via real-time connection with strategic partners and not from the integrating organization."

So, out of this you can see how the Internet is affecting the way the enterprise operates. The cloud acts as the platform for services to provide data to third-parties. REST is the software infrastructure for the exchange. The value is in the real-time delivery.

Mindtouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson gave an overview of the WOA at Gluecon. It's a decent guide to REST and its function in WOA environments.

These new supply chains are not a cure all. But they do give new meaning to the scope of real-time information.