While web services is a term still viewed with caution in New Zealand, US researchers are using it to describe the next wave of applications and technology that will enable seamless connectivity between organisations. While a number of local vendors, integrators and system developers may well qualify as web service providers they’re cautious about the new term in a market already brimming with confusing terminology. IBM’s web service evangelists Dave Allison claims web services represent “a new style of computing, probably as significant as the internet was back in 1992.” Back then the web wasn’t very advanced but a decade later it has been embraced by all major vendors. Internationally Web services are seen as a logical way to integrate internal and external business processes across the internet with the least fuss but it is a pathway lined with obstacles and unanswered questions. While research firms and analysts predict web services will pave the way for unifying business dealings over the web and promise rapid return on investment, a lack of experience in this evolving field means many organisations will be learning from their own mistakes. It appears the web service buzz word has already been overused or misused by eager sales people and IT advocates resulting in confusion among executive on what it is they’re being sold and why they would want to back such projects. Web services are considered a relatively inexpensive way to derive more value from previous IT investments by improving workflow and business. "It's taking what you have and changing the way the pieces interact with each other," says Larry Hawes, senior advisor for Delphi Group and the author of the report. Web services are not following a traditional path of new technology, where early advocates are often upstart vendors who test the waters before the giants enter the market. Delphi Group points to the fact that major vendors - including Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Sun - are leading the push for web services is a sign of its early acceptance - and a sign that it will be rapidly adopted by corporations, says Mr Hawes.
Webservices
So what are web services? These are standards-based applications designed to connect disparate computer systems and remote devices so they speak a common language, particularly for exchanging important business files. It’s a step beyond operating systems, programming languages and middleware. The idea is that web services will create greater harmony between businesses, reduce the pressure on IT departments and streamline supply chain communications.
Key to its success is the widespread use of extensible mark-up language of XML which enables information to be translated between systems while retaining its formatting. A huge amount of investment is going into this area by major vendors and the larger corporates who’re testing the water.
Boston-based IT research and consulting firm Delphi Group (www.delphigroup.com) identifies five major hurdles facing IT executives which may stand in the way of achieving maximum return on a web services investment.
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According to IT executives surveyed for the report primary concerns are:
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"What it's going to take is coding SOAP interfaces to existing applications and making sure content is in XML. It's not like bringing in a big ERP system or supply chain management system." Larry Hawes, senior advisor for Delphi Group. |
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While Delphi Group’s survey showed CIOs and other top-level technology people were 80 per cent convinced web services were "important to imperative" to their business strategy, it was made clear that it's easier to build a new technology than it is to get people to use it. Delphi says IT executives must work to establish a collaborative mindset and explain the business benefits of web services if they are to gain maximum effectiveness and cooperation. While Java developers are seen to be in good supply in the US the biggest concern is finding those experienced in Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE), which is important for architecting Web services. However many vendors are coming to the rescue to provide architectural frameworks used by application developers to build Web services. Among them Sun Microsystems, which is offering J2EE Blueprints, frameworks for developing applications to address specific functionality in web services. Multiple standards for web services, which has added to the general confusion of definitions and acronyms. The report notes that, "standards" have yet to be perfectly defined meaning there is a lack of best-practices, leaving a developer of web services with many choices. The bottom line, according to Delphi Group is that early adopters will learn how to architect web services by “traveling the hard path of trial and error." It claims the cost of implementing the technology isn't nearly as significant as other IT projects – it doesn’t require a lot of new hardware, for example. The value is in extending what you have already, says Hawes. Delphi Group says companies are not expecting to spend heavily on web services. The largest group of respondents (23%) say less than $US100,000, will be spent over three years while 18% said less than $US250,000. Just as changing internal mindsets to embrace web services is pivotal to a successful implementation so is embracing new relationships with outside partners. Connecticut-based research company Meta Group suggests that within the next two to three years web services technology and interfaces will become a standard part of application integration, and commercial the use of web services will be commonplace. Web services are seen as the solution to many challenges corporate IT organisations are facing, opening the way for old and new applications to talk to each other and preparing the foundation for the next-generation component model. The goal is to enable easier and uniform interaction so businesses can exchange data and automate business processes. This is a way of enforcing uniformity so a car parts vendor for example can easily provide an interface to suppliers for inventory inspection and use customer information to guide future actions including ordering parts or restocking shelves. During 2002, early-adopter organisations using the IBM and Microsoft platforms and infrastructures will use web services integration in their e-business and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. Existing commercial services will begin to move to web services technology. By 2003, most packaged business applications and newer custom applications will have fairly complete event-driven interfaces that will be exposed via the web-services model, and web services creation will be an automated part of virtually all development environments. In addition, commercial web service availability will grow rapidly, says Meta Group. “The initial use of web services suggests Meta Group will be driven by the need to remove the interface barriers, enabling any compliant application to invoke any interface function, eliminating the need for substantial investment in middleware and bridging technologies to hide platform differences.” Most organisations will use web services to enable or enhance existing applications to have interfaces to back-office and legacy applications to provide information in a structured form. For example,an inventory consumption forecast displayed on the web will be useful for some suppliers, but others will want to feed this data directly into demand planning or manufacturing planning applications. However B2B use will be limited until there is some level of common understanding about how to deal with quality-of-service issues and security. This will happen slowly in 2002 and accelerate in 2003 as generally accepted mechanisms become available. Early on, when there are few web services, the technology that provisions those services will be derived from existing application capability, or point solution add-ons. As the number of services grows, the need for a central point to administer these services and to create common solutions to various technical characteristics will increase. In some cases, companies will choose to outsource this function, but many will decide to centralise the administration of web services around an in-house platform technology. |
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Principal components of web services:
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A legacy system that is enabled as a web service becomes ‘future proofed’ because future applications can access it as a service, and at some point the technology of the legacy application can be changed without repercussions for the programs that invoke that service.” |
