InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
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April 2, 2001 |
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RADICAL SIMPLICITY
Plug-And-Play Redefined
The move to Web services should simplify and accelerate business collaboration
By Jason Levitt (jlevitt@cmp.com)
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| More on web services: |
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all Street may well be one of the world's high-tech centers, but getting financial institutions to carry out business-to-business transactions isn't much easier than it was five years ago.
"It's almost a stone-age process for two companies to get connected and start doing business electronically," says Sam Johnson, CEO of Transact Tools, an application service provider that focuses on wholesale financial services. "It's very tedious and inefficient."
Transact and many other companies are looking forward to the widespread deployment of Web services, an application framework that could radically simplify global business-to-business communications.
Based on XML--a popular standard for data exchange--Web services can potentially make business-to-business communication a plug-and-play affair by standardizing the way applications make themselves visible over a network. "Brokers have to be connected to banks and money managers to trade electronically," Johnson says. "The Web services model is the vehicle by which that stuff can happen very quickly and dynamically."
Transact, which helps companies such as Archipelago, Instinet, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Knight Securities in business-to-business trading communications, sees Web services not only simplifying connections between businesses, but simplifying the process of finding business partners. "There are 10,000 companies in the financial-services space that need to be interconnected. Without a centralized directory, such as the one Web services offers, the problem of getting connected is very error-prone and tedious. Web services will allow their systems to dynamically discover the way to connect to each other."
The promise of business interoperability, with the ease with which Web pages flow over the Internet, is what will fuel the demand for Web services. That degree of frictionless commerce will require the maturation of complex standards. Still, companies such as Transact, and backers such as IBM, see Web services as a profound shift for businesses. "If the first wave of the Web was to allow humans to share documents with each other, then the next is for businesses to share business processes in an automated fashion," says Steve Holbrook, IBM's technology evangelist for Web services. "We see Web services as even more impactful than the original Web."
With the simplified and standardized Web services interface in front of business processes, back-office operations would be resistant to disruptive system changes--the nemesis of all IT operations. While back-office architectures and even operating systems will evolve, the loosely coupled Web services front end will stay relatively stable. This means that applications accessing your business processes don't necessarily have to change when your underlying infrastructure does.
Application development would also be greatly simplified because developers need not be concerned about the infrastructure details behind the Web services they're invoking. Web services should allow businesses the same vendor independence that has made the Web so successful.
"You could be running a Web service on Linux today and Windows 2000 Server tomorrow, and your customers wouldn't know the difference," says David Turner, Microsoft's senior program manager for XML technologies. "That's the definition of success--vendor independence."
For Web services, vendor independence also means that existing legacy systems won't necessarily have to be significantly modified in order to participate. Merely exposing interfaces that implement the core Web services protocols, then tying the other end of the Web services into legacy systems could achieve the same result.
| Web Services Frameworks | |||||
| Infrastructure software | Developer tools | Protocol support in developer toolkit | |||
| Soap | UDDI | WSDL | |||
| HP
E-Speak e-speak.hp.com |
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X | - | - |
| IBM
Web Services www.ibm.com/developer/ webservices |
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X | X | X |
| Microsoft
.Net www.microsoft.com/net |
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X | X | X |
| Oracle
Dynamic Services otn.oracle.com/products/ dynamic_services |
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X | - | - |
| Sun
Open Net Environment www.sun.com/ software/sunone |
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- | - | - |
| DATA: INFORMATIONWEEK | |||||
With sufficient business processes exposed and available via the Internet, the efficiencies of large-scale automation would be available to companies that previously couldn't afford it. Instead of building or purchasing the costly infrastructure necessary for supply-chain operations with multiple business partners, a business could potentially roll its own, using what's available on the Internet. This sort of virtual systems integration could be based on an ASP model. For an Internet infrastructure, a company might need little more than a server to handle Web services messaging and XML translation to and from its back-end systems.
For companies today, moving to Web services will require, at some level, new infrastructure, and that infrastructure must be tied to major back-office components such as application servers, databases, and directory servers. This fact isn't lost on Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems--which, in a historic show of unity, have collectively blessed the core set of Web services protocols: the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration protocol for cataloging and locating Web services; the Web Services Description Language for describing how to connect to a Web service; and the Simple Object Access Protocol for messaging between Web services. These five vendors, along with many others, have promised to support Soap, UDDI, and WSDL in future product offerings. As companies begin to implement these offerings, they will likely need to upgrade to more powerful servers, databases, and storage devices from the likes of IBM, Oracle, and Sun.
Without denying the potential of Web services, some skeptics nevertheless view the HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Sun alliance as simply an attempt to make a lot of money off consulting services as well. "They want to capitalize on this marketplace reality," says Jean-Christophe Cimetiere, CEO of consulting firm TechMetrix. "You spend $1 million on an E-commerce platform, but then you have to spend an additional $3 million on a consultant that helps your company realize the benefits of that software."
Already, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Sun have outlined their own visions for Web services and have rolled out limited protocol support in their developer tools.
HP is the only major system vendor that has a fully operational services design. Web services is a validation of technologies HP introduced with its E-Speak architecture more than two years ago. "It's great to have companies like IBM and Microsoft describe their vision, which is what we announced in May 1999," says Rajiv Gupta, general manager of HP's E-Speak Operations. Still, HP has to update its architecture to conform to the emerging Web services protocols. HP recently updated components to comply with the Soap specification.
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