Business Objects SA on Tuesday will debut a software development kit (SDK) for building Web services for business-intelligence applications.

Business Objects has already met with a fair amount of success providing its business-intelligence software for extranet applications. The vendor says it has more than 650 customers using its products for extranet purposes. But Business Objects believes that Web services, which let Web-based applications seamlessly access and exchange data, will one day replace extranets that require pre-existing relationships and point-to-point connections.

"I think Web services are going to be very important," says Hurwitz Group analyst Jackie Coolidge, who predicts that they will catch on for business intelligence before other applications. "What [Business Objects] is doing, putting a stake in the ground early, puts them in a leadership position."

The new BusinessObjects Web Services SDK will include a high-level API that developers can use to expose business-intelligence functions as Web services. Those services will be deployed on the vendor's Web Intelligence and Infoview Portal software. A manufacturing company, for example, could use Web services built using the SDK to pull in information from multiple suppliers' IT systems to compare data about inventory availability and price.

The software is undergoing beta testing and is expected to be available for Java 2 Enterprise Edition and .Net in the second quarter of next year. Pricing and packaging have not been determined, although the company says it will likely be bundled with the BusinessObjects Developer Suite.