Web services is a maturing technology and IT shops need to
recognise its benefits now, rather than holding off until ongoing
standardisation efforts conclude, according to Bob Sutor, IBM's
director of web services technology.
At the XML Web Services One conference in California, Sutor
stressed that web services is no longer a brand new technology and
that web services need to be brought into the "ecosystem".
"People say, 'We're going to wait until all the standards are
done.' Well, wait at your own peril," Sutor said. "Heterogeneity
is part of the world. Web services is a key technology that can
smooth that out," he added.
Standards efforts have moved beyond basic technologies such as
Soap and into higher level areas such as business process
integration with the proposed Business Process Execution Language
for Web Services (BPEL4WS) specification, Sutor noted. Web services
technologies are now showing up in products, he said.
Sutor emphasised web services integration benefits. "What I
would say is that web services really [combine] the best of what
we've seen with integration practices in the past," including
technologies such as Corba, he said. But he added: " We're not
trying to create the new Corba."
Afterwards, he explained that Corba was viewed as too monolithic
of a technology.
Sutor hailed IBM as having the industry's broadest support
for web services. He also noted IBM's formation of Web Services
Industry Councils (WSIC). These councils, according to IBM's
website, serve as a global community of IBM customers and business
partners in key industries, chartered to accelerate time to
business value of web services implementations.
WSIC members represent the following industries: financial
services, manufacturing, distribution/retail, and the public
sector, including government and health care.