Leadership Quote by John W. Thompson

Thompson’s sentence is the kind of corporate plain-speech that quietly flags a power shift: once you move to a “Web service paradigm,” trust stops being an internal IT preference and becomes the product. In a world of APIs, distributed systems, and partners you don’t control, “integrity” isn’t a vague virtue; it’s the thin membrane between a functioning business and a public incident report.

Notice the doubling: “integrity of the data and integrity and validity of the connection.” He’s separating two failure modes executives often lump together. Data integrity is about what’s stored and processed being correct and untampered; connection integrity/validity is about who’s on the other end, whether the channel can be trusted, whether the request is authentic. That split anticipates the modern reality that breaches don’t have to steal anything to be catastrophic. If an attacker can spoof identity, poison inputs, or manipulate service-to-service calls, your “truth” collapses even if your database remains intact.

The subtext is also strategic, not merely technical. Thompson frames security as “an element in any company’s strategy,” implying that Web services turn risk management into competitive positioning. Reliability becomes brand equity; compliance becomes market access; uptime becomes customer experience. It’s a businessman’s way of translating cryptography and authentication into boardroom language: if you’re betting on interoperability and speed, you’re also betting on the systems that make other people’s code safe to trust.