E-Business

Web services to go beyond initial integration promise

One of the main hurdles early e-business adopters failed to negotiate was the whole issue of applications integration. Not only could they not get that elusive supply chain collaboration systems integration right, but also their own internal systems tied together in any seamless format. IT was an expensive exercise that failed to deliver.

The emergence of Web Services promises to change all this, according to Jay van Zyl, of Rubico Products, the Business Components Company whose focus is on the delivery of custom-fit solutions for the financial services sector.

"Web Services are only just emerging from some development labs, " he says, " but we are already delivering to our customers and this year, Web services will become the new model for distributed e-business computing."

While this year is seen as the year Web Services begin to move into the enterprise, Gartner is predicting 2004 the year when Web Services really dominate new applications at Fortune 2000 companies. But it suggests that IT to start getting ready this year.

"2002 is the year companies need to start putting together teams of developers who will become well seasoned to lead bigger and more valuable Web services efforts later," according to a Gartner Research Note, entitled Web Services: 2002 and Beyond.

The Gartner timeline predicts Web services begin to emerge as "the next generation of platform middleware" in 2003, when, it predicts, 80% of platform vendors will be supporting Web Services architectures.

Van Zyl sees Web Services initially being used internally to facilitate integration shortfalls, but believes there is no reason, providing standards fall into place quickly, that Web Services cannot go beyond the firewall to integrate partners, suppliers and customers.

"But Web Services down the line are about a lot more than integration. Being components-based they open up a brand new affordable and flexible IT world where companies will need to buy and maintain only the IT technology they really need and download components for other applications on an as-needed basis as Web Services," says Van Zyl.

"It will need a complete shift in the way people think about building and deploying applications. In reality, in the future, it won`t be about building applications, as we know them today. It will be about building digital services."

Instead of today`s monolithic, factotum applications, Web Services are more granular applications, designed to deliver an open, Web-based architecture to connect business processes. They turn upside down the way people will think of, create, and use software.

"Companies will be able to support their unique business processes by building a jigsaw of Web services best suited to their own needs, choosing from a catalogue of components that are paid for and distributed over the Web."

Developers such as Rubico have taken an early position on Web services and have been able to align their components-based enterprise applications to take advantage of Web Services in the financial services arena in which they operate.

Rubico`s component-based approach to software development - which accelerates the coding process, reduces the number of errors, and limits software maintenance was key to its early adoption of Web Services.

"Assembling unique applications becomes very simple. Say a company needs an e-commerce site. It is possible, by selecting from a range of pre-existing components, to wire together several applications such as order processing, credit card processing, logistics etc into the e-business application.

"Currently, you`re really only looking at Web Services developed by a particular company, but when the real Age of Web Services developers will be asked to create services that leverage other services to create a network of applications that were unforeseen by the people who built the initial service," he concludes.