Jay van Zyl, co-founder of Rubico the Business Component Company, and joint CEO of Rubico Products Company, investigates Web Services as a means of realising the Nirvana of a collaborative commerce in the future.
The Internet is ready to embark on what is seen as its most exciting phase to date - one of process sharing. It takes the technology`s initial stages of information sharing and exchange to their logical conclusion - the creation of a collaborative community in which business processes are linked across the value chain - buyer, seller, business partner.
The integration of business processes beyond the enterprise has proved a considerable technology barrier to true collaboration to date. But 2002 and beyond should see the emergence of Web Services - a new class of applications that can talk and work with one another over the Internet.
They can be seen as a collection of standards-based functions packaged as a single entity and published to the network for use by other programs. Web services are building blocks for creating open distributed systems, and allow companies and individuals to quickly and cheaply make their digital assets available worldwide.
Web Services are destined to play a crucial role in the future of computing. In essence, they provide a piece of functionality through the Internet. One of the more important and interesting aspects of Web Services is the standardisation and broad acceptance of protocols such as XML (eXtensible Markup Language, for formatting messages), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol, for calling Web Services), UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration, for finding Web Services) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language, for the description of Web Services).
Web Services perform the functions that can be anything from simple requests to complicated business processes. A single function could, for example, be a foreign exchange spreadsheet embedded in a bank`s web page. The exchange rates could be updated every few minutes totally transparently to the user, via a Web Service from InetBridge.
Similarly, a travel agent might use them to provide such Website services as airline bookings, car rental and insurance. Today the agent would have to implement and integrate the different systems, probably from different vendors, to manage all the business processes around these three aspects - ordering, processing, payment, delivery etc.
Tomorrow, the travel agent will simply source a suitable Web Service application from the UDDI directory and drag it onto his Website to create a component of the company`s total business solution.
In a corporate environment, Web Services can be hosted in a central location and used from any company or business partner location. This means that an accounts package need only be developed once for the company, thus saving development time and money. This will also reduce the expenditure on support and administration for the software, since it only runs in one location.
Hype or reality?
Well companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle Sun and BEA all have advanced Web Services strategies. Microsoft has already announced a set of personalised Web Services such as MyAddress, MyEmail, MyCalendar, and MyAgenda. By integrating all of these Web Services as part of the travel agency`s system, for example, customer movements can be automatically tracked. Once new address details were logged into the MyAddress Web Service, the information would be transferred to the customer administration Web Service.
And although Gartner does not believe the aggressive use of Web services will really happen until 2005 it describes Web Services as one of the hottest trends in IT and believes more than 40 percent of enterprises` first experience with Web Services will be an internal deployment of Web Services-enabled architecture. It also recommends that enterprises experiment with Web services early, and not wait for the perfect implementation. It sees financial-services industry will be among the first to adopt Web services "Web services will offer some business-to-business benefits early on as well, namely by transforming the process through which enterprises make connections with one another," Gartner concludes.
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Rubico delivers large-scale, mission critical business solutions for unique needs via a set of reusable components - a solutions development approach which GartnerGroup predicts will account for 70% of applications delivery by 2003. The company`s key market focus is the financial services sector, but it has delivered solutions across a wide range of industries.
Rubico`s clients include Sanlam, Bankfin, Medscheme and Metropolitan. It has appointed local and international, value-added resellers as its main channel to market. For revenue growth, the company is looking for 80% of sales to be generated overseas by 2004.
The company has 180 staff members, 80% of whom are directly involved in product creation. Of these, two-thirds are business consultants - experts in fields other than IT, as delivering the Rubico solution never requires writing code.
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