WebServices : A Key Component for the Next Phase of e-business

        A few years ago, when the industry buzzword "Java" hit the streets, it was hyped to solve all of the ills of the software industry. Java has since been proven to be an extremely useful and successful programming language and application platform. A while later, the hype was about a new buzzword, XML. Like Java, XML has been proven to be very successful. And when used in conjunction with Java, it gives the Internet a degree of data integration that goes beyond what we had with Java initially.

Today, the next big buzzword is Web services. Java, XML, and Web services are a mighty trinity, bringing to the the world a platform, data format, and message format that are powerful, open, and portable. These three buzzwords are demonstrating their value to the world and have significant potential to do great things for e-business.

The concept of e-business is a 25-year transformation of the economy that is just emerging from infancy. The first generation of e-business, which has been around for nearly five years, has largely been about taking existing relationships, business processes and applications and making them accessible through the Internet. In addition, it has been largely a user-driven medium. That is, until now, only humans have been able to navigate it, discover resources and interact with those resources through existing open standards on the Internet like HTTP, URLs, and HTML.

The capability is just starting to emerge that will enable business processes (a.k.a. applications) to navigate, discover and interact with other applications via the open standards of the Internet. It falls under the banner of Web services.

Web services is a standards-based approach to integrating applications running across distributed servers that are connected via an intranet, extranet, or the Internet. For example, if Server 1 knows how to process foreign currency conversions and an application on Server 2 needs that particular functionality, then it would be beneficial to let Server 2 tap into the function on Server 1 rather than having the developer re-create that functionality on Server 2. This notion of integrating applications that can be distributed over the net isn't a new concept, but Web services provide the means to do it easier, more securely, and without the complexity of writing a custom interface for each application. Think of it as a standards-based "Lego" approach for mixing and matching new or existing application modules. The resulting business solutions are integrated both within the enterprise and beyond the firewall with customers and partners.

Web services eliminate a lot of the custom coding now needed in e-business environments like EAI and B2B. While it has been possible to build distributed applications using technologies such as COM+, CORBA, RMI, etc., these technologies cannot be deployed widely across the Internet to a large number of global participants, -- which is a requirement for B2B solutions. Additionally, these technologies require the developer to write custom interfaces for application integration.

Web services represent the confluence of technology and adherence to open standards that will enable e-business success. Simply put, businesses will be able to re-engineer their applications and business processes and become more proactive in the way they take advantage of this dynamic nature.IBM calls this transformation dynamic e-business. A key enabler of dynamic e-business is Web services.

Dynamic e-business is the result of re-engineered business processes that are Internet-savvy from the start and are, therefore, inherently dynamic. Dynamic e-business also represents the notion that applications can be dynamically integrated based on real-time conditions. Its value will be more profound than the first generation of e-business based on simple enablement of access to existing applications that were not supercharged for the Internet.

Key to the success of dynamic e-business and Web services is the adoption of open standards in the Internet that support these capabilities in a manner that is vendor-neutral and widely supported. IBM's philosophy is simple: cooperate on open standards, compete on implementations. We are executing against this philosophy in regards to driving SOAP, WSDL,UDDI, and XML - the key Web services standards -- and implementing in our e-business platform software, WebSphere.

For instance, if a business needs to purchase pencils, a human buyer plugs in a URL that sends them to a site, which presents an HTML document that allows them to navigate to the specified site, say officeExample.com, to make the purchase. It's the end user that is driving the transaction. Comparison shopping involves going to the individual sites of each office supply vendor. That takes time and is inefficient.

The alternative consists of creating heavy duty business-to-business interaction between your own business and a select number of business partners. In this model, an application from one business interacts directly with a well-defined application from another company using a communication/integration protocol that both companies have agreed on, and will typically vary depending on the applications and systems that both companies are running. Because of the complexity of this type of application integration, it is quite often only justifiable for core processes, and with well-defined business partners. Up to now, there was no open standards-based capability in the Internet for an application or a business process to be developed to go out and navigate, discover and interact with other applications over the Internet. The standards had not been established.

Web services will now help provide that capability, and change the pencil-buying scenario a great deal. Under this new e-business model, a purchasing application can be programmed to perform a number of functions that act on behalf of the purchaser. Not only will it automatically interact with the original pencil vendor, it will reach out and say "I need pencils, this is how much I'm willing to pay, and this is the quality of the pencil that I need." This application, acting on a buyer's behalf, goes out and queries all other applicable companies and obtains the right results. There's no being tied to a single supplier, and it keeps the buyer aware of the best possible deal.

What makes Web services so attractive is the fact that applications can go out and check out these different business applications over the Internet, determine who can best meet customer needs at that exact second time and then make a decision is something that can't be done today very efficiently and without costly proprietary connections. And by definition that would not be using the Internet, because the Internet by definition is open.Web services are a natural extension of IBM's overall commitment to open standards. While other companies are taking a more proprietary approach, IBM is the only company that has comprehensively enabled its infrastructure software, which includes DB2, Lotus, Tivoli and WebSphere, to support the broadest and deepest collection of open Internet standards required for dynamic e-business. This will enable businesses to create, publish, securely deploy, host and manage Web services applications. Businesses will also be able to convert their existing applications into Web services. Open standards, application integration and Web transactions are the cornerstone of IBM's WebSphere Software Platform and is thus the natural choice for building dynamic e-business applications based on existing capabilities of Web Services standards.

By IBM Thailand Co., Ltd.