IBM, Microsoft and other vendors that have been beating the
web services drum for more than two years claim that more and more
of their customers are building web services. But the spotty
levels of commitment by corporate users was plainly evident based
on comments by 15 IT professionals at Gartner's Application
Integration and Web Services Summit in Baltimore,US.Some have adopted a service-oriented development approach, and
they noted a growing collection of wb services. But more said
they're just getting started, with few or even just one wb service
in production, and others expressed scepticism about the ability of
web services to address complex integration woes.
"The problem is the business case," said Martin Prater, a
Zurich-based vice president of technology management at Credit
Suisse Financial Services. He said a number of partners and
customers have asked for programmatic access to the firm's SAP
systems. "But the cost benefit is to them," he said.
Prater said Credit Suisse will stick with Corba (Common Object
Request Broker Architecture) until it really has to make changes.
Although licensing costs might be cheaper for web services-based
products, "the migration effort would never be worth it," he
said.
Jonathan Pettus, a manager in the integration project office at
Nasa's Marshall Space Flight Center, noted "the hype" around web
services but said it's "very naive" to think that an application
that supports XML can solve a company's integration problems.
Pettus said he can foresee web services being useful for
information exchange with the public. Next spring, for instance,
NASA plans to advertise job openings through Monster.com and use a
Soap adapter from SeeBeyond Technology to enable resumes to get
into its back-end systems through a web service, he said.
He noted that one technology vendor claims to be doing a
complete conversion to web services to get internal applications to
interoperate. But that will not happen at Nasa, Pettus said.
"How long is it going to take us to get the thousands of
applications that we have in NASA web-serviceable?" he said.
Gartner analyst Roy Schulte estimated that 95% of the web
services being used today are internal between "like" systems. "You
don't mix vendor Soap stacks in 95% of the cases, because they
don't work together if you're trying to do anything fancy," he
said. "If both the client and the server are using the Microsoft
development tools, it's amazingly easy to build web services. But
when you're mixing, it gets much harder."
Schulte predicted that there won't be "pluggable
interoperability with no customisation" for at least five years,
since vendor implementations will continue to vary. He likened the
situation to database vendors' support for SQL. "It is not easy to
port an application from Oracle to SQL Server to DB2 to Sybase," he
said. "The same thing will be true for web services."
Schulte also predicted that web services between heterogeneous
systems over HTTP in high-throughput, low-latency scenarios won't
be possible in the foreseeable future -- although simple Soap-based
request-and-replay messages over HTTP work today. And reliable
messaging and security will improve, he added.
The Web Services Interoperability Organisation, led by IBM and
Microsoft, has been working to resolve some of the thornier issues.
In September, the two vendors demonstrated how advanced web
services specifications enabled disparate systems to securely and
reliably exchange messages in a test situation.
Still, many users remain wary. Harold Schaefer, an associate
director of database administration and application integration
technologies at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, said he is eager to
experiment with web services, and he would ultimately like to use
them in a heterogeneous environment. But he has concerns about
their security and reliability.
"It needs to get more mature," Schaefer said.
Andrew Tessier, director of technical services at Park Nicollet
Health Services, has other concerns. Now that the company has gone
live with a simplistic web service to demonstrate the benefits to
management, it has to address the development staff's lack of web
services skills, as well as the clumsiness of sending big XML files
through constrained pipes.
Van Crozier, a Seattle-based technology architect at health care
provider The Regence Group, worries more about the management of
web services. "I don't want these things to spring up with nobody
keeping track of them," he said.
But companies committed to web services are working around the
problems and limitations. Gary Lien, a systems architect with Life
Time Fitness, said his company's external web services are with a
single partner, making it easier to deal with security issues. The
company gets around the issue of reliable messaging by doing only
synchronous communication, he said.
Mike Wasiak, manager of shared services at T Rowe Price
Investment Technologies, said that the firm's first web services,
launched earlier this year, represented a natural progression
after Corba and Enterprise JavaBeans. But the company does not use
web services for every business need.
For instance, T Rowe Price will probably shy away from web
services when it needs high performance or when going from an
internally built Java system to another internally built Java
system, Wasiak said. "Why take the penalty of a remote invocation
when you don't need to?" Wasiak said, describing the Java-to-Java
scenario.
Carol Silwa writes for IDG News Service.