Integration and interoperability were the buzzwords of the day at
IBM's Web services strategy briefing.
IT vendors are under such a tremendous amount of pressure from
customers to develop and stick to Web services standards that even
Microsoft, is playing nicely with others, said several IBM
executives.
Microsoft and IBM are among the nine companies that founded the Web
Services Interoperability organisation (WS-I) in February. The
initiative is intended to promote reliable interoperability and
offer implementation guidance.
Within two years, industry standards oversight groups such as the
World Wide Web Consortium and the Organisation for Structured
Information Standards will have approved around two dozen Web
services standards, said Bob Sutor, IBM's director of e-business
standards strategy. What the industry now needs is practical advice
for developers on building software to those standards and tools to
test software for compatibility, he said.
WS-I has already received 450 membership inquiries in the month
since its launch.
Web services is an often nebulous phrase. In IBM's view, it is
enabling technology for connecting via the Internet an array of
diverse applications. The goal is to allow customers to interact
seamlessly with their partners, suppliers and clients.
Such interaction between systems built on disparate hardware,
operating systems and programming languages requires an exceptional
level of cooperation and adherence to standards - not traits the IT
industry is known for. Still, Sutor said, vendors understand that
it is in everyone's best interests to make this work.
"IBM is most certainly going to compete extremely aggressively on
the platform choices our customers make," he said, "but we
understand very pragmatically that if they (customers) buy our
products and they can't communicate with the Microsofts, Suns,
Oracles and BEAs of the world, we fail."
IBM estimates that $4bn (£2.8bn) is spent annually on e-business
infrastructure, with nearly half that total spent on integration,
said IBM WebSphere's director of marketing, Scott Hebner. IBM views
itself and Microsoft as the two leading software infrastructure
providers, with other vendors such as Sun Microsystems and BEA
providing "point pieces," he said.
IBM and Microsoft are working together on development of several
Web services standards, including a SOAP security extension. But
Web services only dictate a common method for how applications on a
network discover and interact with each other, not for how those
applications are implemented, Hebner said.
One customer working on a Web services implementation said things
have been running fairly smoothly. Human resources consultancy
Hewitt Associates provides outsourced services for a number of its
clients, and needs a way to offer easy access to employee data to
clients and third-party service providers. This prompted the
company to investigate its Web services options, said Hewitt's
chief technology strategist, Tim Hilgenberg.
Hewitt used an Apache SOAP implantation in conjunction with IBM's
WebSphere. Standards for security, one of Hewitt's largest
concerns, are "immature but usable," Hilgenberg said. After some
infrastructure development work, Hewitt was able to enable digital
signatures.
Overall, initial reaction from clients has been positive,
Hilgenberger said. The next innovation he'd like to see is
asynchronous processing capability, which is a "major missing
piece" in HTTP.
"We need an asynchronous interface to control scale and volume," he
said. "Once you get that, that will really enable
business-to-business transactions."