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Defining The Business Value Of Technology
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By Jason Levitt
"One-stop shopping for all your business needs," might be the cliché that best sums up the goals of the UDDI registry. The Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration registry, an ambitious attempt to create a global online registry that maps businesses to the services that they offer, could eventually become the first place that companies go to find the goods and services they need. Considering the complexity of business-to-business transactions, anything remotely close to one-stop shopping is worth considering. And with UDDI’s formidable coalition of backers (IBM, Microsoft, and Sun, to name a few), this is one initiative that has a chance. Notably absent from the list of supporters are Hewlett-Packard, whose 1-year-old E-Speak (http://www.espeak.hp.com) service is a direct competitor to UDDI and Oracle, who’s undoubtedly cautious about flatly endorsing it too soon.
A Level Playing Field
The potential for nearly universal B-to-B connectivity is UDDI’s biggest deliverable, but my favorite aspect of the registry is that it’s the first service that levels the playing field for B-to-B commerce. A level playing field, in this case, means that every business has an equal chance of being "discovered" via a search of the UDDI registry. If businesses use the UDDI registry to search for business partners, they’re not going to just get the Fortune 1000 companies, who typically have the most money to invest in marketing and business development, but they’re going to get every business in the registry that satisfies their search criteria.
The Cyber Systems Integrator
If UDDI takes off, there are new business ideas that its technologies will generate. I see a role for the "cyber" systems integrator, which creates wholly new services for its business customers by piecing together the services they find in the UDDI registry. This systems integrator could, using some custom XML-savvy tools, put together a complex system much more quickly and cheaply than could be done today. This assumes that businesses continue to follow the trend of moving their B-to-B to XML formats, and that they enable their back-end systems with the technologies promoted by the UDDI registry. The primary UDDI technology for describing and implementing interfaces to business services is the Web Services Description Language (http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/general/wsdl.asp) which specifies Microsoft’s Simple Object Access Protocol, a lightweight interprocess communications protocol, as its primary transport. SOAP is the uber-connectivity for UDDI, and its potential applications will reach far outside of B-to-B commerce. There is, for example, no reason why desktop applications can’t use SOAP to directly communicate with each other or with servers, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing that happen as soon as Microsoft, and others, start building SOAP into its applications.
Open-Source UDDI
Any businesses interested in enabling its applications for UDDI should look closely at the open-source JUDDI (www.juddi.org), or Java UDDI, that Bowstreet Incorporated (http://www.bowstreet.com) is building. Based on the initial UDDI draft specifications, this open-source project is meant to create a toolkit that developers can use to add UDDI search and discovery to their own applications, as well as an implementation of the UDDI registry. You can join the fun at the Source Forge Web site, http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/uddi.
Participation Means SOAP
The UDDI Registry is ambitious, but to realize its potential will require that businesses choose to fully participate. If UDDI does see widespread adoption, the fallout may be a fast track for widespread adoption of Microsoft’s SOAP, on users’ desktops and on business servers. Users may be surprised to find their desktop applications communicating directly with data sources, bypassing Web servers and browsers entirely.
UDDI registration was supposed to start at three beta sites (Ariba, IBM, and Microsoft) last week. Those sites are linked here (http://www.uddi.org/iwanttoregister.html). If registration isn’t available this week, start hassling your local Ariba, IBM, and Microsoft representatives for not following through on their press release promise to have the sites up "within 30 days."
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