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Business process standards a major hurdle for Web services


Johannesburg, 30 May 2002

While fierce rivals in the IT industry have managed to thrash out the early global technical standards for the world of Web services, most vertical industries have their work cut out for them in standardising the business processes that these services will describe and facilitate.

That`s the word from Rick Parry, MD of Progress Software South Africa. Web services are applications that are able to use a technical lingua franca to communicate with each other and share data over the Internet, regardless of operating system or programming language.

Competing vendors such as Sun, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft have drawn on protocols like HTTP, simple object access protocol (SOAP) and XML as the standards for sharing information between applications across the Internet.

Web services will allow companies to seek and source services across the Internet and ease the integration of business-to-business and business-to-consumer applications. However, Web services describe business processes and not only technical protocols. Industries need to agree on ways to describe a product`s colour, price, order size and delivery dates, for example.

Says Parry: "The primary difficulty is that Web services are not just technology standards like those of CDs or DVDs, for example. All CDs conform to technology standards that ensure they can be played on any manufacturer`s equipment. "Companies operating in a specific vertical industry need to agree on global standard business process definitions before they can attain the Holy Grail of Web services and business-to-business e-commerce - seamless integration of disparate systems and easy sharing of information between people, companies and systems."

Parry believes the earliest Web services successes will be consumer-based services, such as Microsoft`s Passport and .Net My Services, for the simple reason that these do not involve complex inter-company business processes.

"In the business world, Web services will first take root in industry areas where great advances have already been made in defining business process standards, such as the well-organised and consolidated financial services and automotive industries.

"Major motor manufacturers and their suppliers have already developed the CommerceOne business-to-business site, and Web services will be a logical extension to that marketplace. They will increase the flexibility of automotive companies, giving them all the advantages of tight supply chains with the flexibility to bring new suppliers onto the marketplace very quickly," says Parry.

However, in more fragmented markets that are characterised by a range of complex and disparate business processes, bringing the players together to discuss the setting of standards will be more difficult and time-consuming.

Nonetheless, Web services will eventually become ubiquitous because the benefits they offer are too great to ignore, says Parry. For internal IT departments, Web services will help to slash the cost and complexity of integrating systems, both internally and with the platforms and technologies used by trading partners. Once Web services are fully mature, companies will also have unprecedented freedom in choosing their applications - they will no longer be constrained by the other applications in their IT environment, databases, operating systems or the platforms used by their trading partners.

"Web services have the potential to increase the agility of the organisation`s IT environment. It will be easier to outsource systems or make use of application service providers, as well as to establish new business partnerships with external companies," says Parry.

Web services will also help developers to build new applications and services for internal and external use with unprecedented speed. They will be able to search Internet repositories for snippets of code, applications or services that they need to build a new application.

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Editorial contacts

Karen Breytenbach
FHC
(011) 608 1228
karen@fhc.co.za
Rick Parry
Progress Software SA
(011) 254 5400
rparry@progress.com