On the cusp of a revolution
Roberto Michel, Editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 3/1/2002 7:00:00 AM
Web services: it sounds like a new spin on application hosting, but it's not. Web services are a means of building distributed systems that can connect and interact with each other easily across the Internet, using open standards such as eXtensible markup language (XML).
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, is among the software industry luminaries touting Web services. Ballmer was in Chicago for a recent event put on by channel management software vendor Click Commerce, and gave his views on what he calls the "XML/Web services" era.
According to Ballmer, there have been three revolutions in the widespread use of computing. The first centered on the PC; the second, on the graphical user interface; and the third, on the Web. Ballmer says that XML/Web services represents the fourth such revolution, "and perhaps the one most directly related to real business value."
That value comes from the ability of standards such as XML and simple object access protocol, or SOAP, to streamline the sharing of design, supply, and customer information between companies, says Ballmer. "[Web services] is a big deal," he says. "It ranks right up there with the other major shifts."
Ballmer complimented Click Commerce on its use of Microsoft's .NET technologies. Click's 4.3 release of its channel management suite uses .NET technology to enable Web services for the sharing of catalog data. Ballmer also spoke of the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) Organization, a newly formed group that will promote Web services interoperability, and whose members include Microsoft, IBM, Accenture, HP, Intel, Oracle, and SAP.
But Web services have a long way to go.
For one thing, analyst firm Gartner contends it will take until the second half of 2002 before larger enterprises begin interfacing with Web services periodically, and 2003 before smaller companies begin to use Web services. Meanwhile, Sun Microsystems is notably absent from initial WS-I membership, which doesn't bode well for complete industry acceptance of WS-I's guidance.
Even Ballmer, while talking up the availability of .NET products, says Microsoft is in the process of reworking its widely used Outlook and Exchange e-mail solutions for greater XML-compatibility. The next versions of these applications, he says, will use XML data stores to better enable Web services.
In general, says Ballmer, we are "somewhere between early stage and immature" in achieving the full promise of Web services. Certainly, we'll be hearing much more about Web services in the next couple of years, even as software vendors chip away at richer Web services support, and as common ground for standards gets shaken out by the likes of WS-I.
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