Microsoft's chairman Bill Gates and IBM's software chief
Steve Mills cemented their companies' commitment to working
together on accelerating the creation and adoption of web services
standards and applications.
The executives said that accelerating web services standards and
associated applications will give corporate users a compelling
reason to increase their IT budgets. Web services could
subsequently, help lift the IT industry out of the financial
doldrums.
"What is really important here is that we can give buyers a
reason to spend more on technology given the tough economy we are
living in right now. We think whatever they spend on web services
to do things like connect up supply chains offers them tremendous
payback," said Mills.
"What we are trying to do [through the acceleration of web
services standards] is lay the foundation [for turning around] all
of that hype that didn't happen in the 1990s," Gates said.
Asked if the public display of support signalled a softening in
the often hard-edged competition the two companies have engaged in
the past several years, both downplayed the notion.
"There is always going to be a delta between industry standards
we agree on and what companies [like IBM and Microsoft] do
uniquely. The goal is to let our users carry out ambitious
applications using standards. Think of .net as being our
implementation of web services," Gates said.
The web services standards that each company will focus on
includes WS-Security, Reliable Messaging, and WS-Transaction.
It is expected that these standards would get presented to
organisations such as Oasis or W3C and become incorporated into
their respective core tools and platforms, within the next six
months to a year.
Ed Scannell writes for InfoWorld
