Web services dominate the agenda of Yogesh Gupta, the chief
technology officer of Computer Associates (CA).
In a detailed interview Gupta outlined his company's plans for the
new medium for delivering software services.
Where do you think customers will initially deploy Web
services?
What we're finding is that for most IT
organisations, they really intend to use the power of the Web
services technology to integrate internal systems and the systems
of their business partners. There's tremendous interest in IT
organisations for that. What makes Web services exciting and
interesting is the simplicity of the approach.
What will Computer Associates specifically be doing in this
area?
We're doing a variety of things to enable
enterprise-class, mission critical-class Web services. We are
actually working to change all of our products so they can manage
Web services.
So, for example, [CA's] UniCenter not only manages the regular
infrastructure - which is everything from networking systems to
database and application servers and apps and so on - but also
manages the Web services component to ensure availability and
performance.
Similarly, our portfolio of security tools would secure Web
services and access to Web services in terms of who is
authenticated and authorised. We have a high-performance, highly
scalable directory for keeping track of who the users are, what the
Web services are, who can use it and who can do what with which Web
service.
There are some very interesting security nuances around Web
services that have to be dealt with. We believe that our access
control, Web access control, directory and certificate technology
can leverage that. Another area is our portal technology, which is
being enhanced so that it can automatically take any Web service
and come up with a default visualisation for it.
In terms of the competition between Java 2, Enterprise Edition
(J2EE) and .Net environments, which one do you think will
ultimately dominate?
My game is to make money, and the way
I make money is that I don't really care which one wins, as long as
I help both those camps. In my opinion, there will be a
heterogeneous Web services environment within an enterprise. People
aren't going to change their mail service from Outlook to a
J2EE-based thing. People aren't going to change some of their J2EE
applications to .Net. That's the reality of the world. We are
working very closely with Microsoft, and we're working very closely
with Sun Microsystems.
Do you think that Web services will enable more software
competition because it will be easier to integrate best-of-breed
software applications?
The question really becomes: How
fast can SAP get there with its Web services implementation? I
think that the challenge that the little vendors will have is that
even though you can use Web services to integrate, the standards
are still up for grabs. Just because you have XML doesn't
necessarily mean that there is a standard that everybody agrees on
and how a new system should really interact with an order-entry
system. There is an opportunity, but I am not sure that the
opportunity will be something that others will be able to make the
most of.
Computer Associates has made a push into the area of business
process integration. What impact will Web services have in this
space?
If you look at the Web services orchestration noise
and hype, it is all around business process, specifically
integrating a Web-flowing business process across multiple Web
services. You have to let people use Web services as an integrated
application.
Within our portal, for example, we're expanding our portal solution
to provide support for Web services. It will also have support for
things like some degree of Web services orchestration and workflow.
I'm sure the app server vendors will probably provide something in
that area as well. We see the co-ordination, orchestration and the
management of the business process across multiple Web services
becoming one of the pieces within our global server
technology.
What will be needed to marry Web services with transaction-based
processing requirements?
Right now, each vendor is
actually trying to come up with their own orchestration stuff: IBM
is doing stuff, Microsoft's doing stuff, BEA is doing stuff, CA is
doing stuff and Oracle is doing stuff.
In terms of co-ordinating multiple Web services into a single
transaction, I think that's really workflow-type technology. With
Web services orchestration, you want to know exactly what's going
on in my transactions and when they're actually happening and not
happening, and where the bottlenecks are. We see delivering that
through UniCenter.
But if you want to have transactional security rather than
individual Web service security, that's a very different approach.
Web services orchestration, I think, becomes an integration and
workflow management challenge on one hand and then management of
security challenge on the other hand. I think the jury is out on
exactly what happens there. But Web services orchestration is
really the next step.
How far along is Computer Associates with XML?
Our
portal server today is completely XML-based. That's why we are
excited about what we can do in the area of Web services with it.
UniCenter 3.0 has XML interfaces to a variety of UniCenter
services. I think we have actually gone a substantial way already,
and actually talked about an appliance using XML and our products
that support XML today.
What impact will Microsoft's myServices offering, otherwise
known as Hailstorm, have on the enterprise?
It has more of
an impact for the consumer side than on the business desktop. The
challenge that Microsoft faces in terms of making Hailstorm
technologies the sort of key thing for enterprises is that their
back-end services are limited to Windows servers. I don't expect
Microsoft to really come out with a Web services implementation
that's more scalable on Solaris than it is on Windows servers.
Because of that, I think that it'll be interesting to see how far
along they get in terms of getting Hailstorm and Hailstorm
technologies to sort of be adopted in the enterprise.
Beyond Web services, what else is Computer Associates excited
about?
Wireless technology as a whole is extremely
exciting. The whole notion of having mobile users with reliable
high-speed wireless connections really changes the game. There is a
tremendous amount of opportunity in the wireless Internet and the
wireless Web. We can do software updates to the wireless
infrastructure for devices. We do asset management of devices for
wireless infrastructure. We manage the wireless infrastructure with
UniCenter. We know the location of people based on the access
points. We can track a device as it goes across wireless access
point. We provide security in a wireless infrastructure, with both
encryption technologies and things like access control
authentication. We're working very closely with most of the leading
vendors in the wireless space. I think that it will be awesome in
terms of an opportunity for our underlying technologies.
How significant is peer-to-peer networking going to
be?
With UniCenter 3.0, we did a bunch of peer-to-peer
work, and we're doing more with the upcoming releases of UniCenter.
One of the things you need peer-to-peer for is scalability. With
UniCenter 3.0, we have a solution for managing networks that are
scalable to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of devices. It
is very much a carrier-class network management solution, and I
just see that continuing to grow.
Is there anything else on your immediate radar
screen?
The whole storage space is continuing to evolve in
a very interesting way. The 11 September incident brought
tremendous focus on disaster recovery. As a human being, you hate
to leverage tragedy, but at the same time the reality of business
out there is that it took something like that for a lot of
businesses to wake up when it comes to disaster recovery.
One of the biggest challenges is that the amount of data has grown
tremendously, and the window for back-up and recovery has grown
shorter. We're seeing huge interest in the extremely
high-performance, highly scalable back-up and recovery solutions.