Platform progress
- Article 1 of 1
- Flexible B2B, January 2002
How are B2B platform developers incorporating support for web services into their products?
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An organisation that needs to exchange data with key trading partners must typically choose between two options, says Brian Connell, chief technology officer of web services software company, WestGlobal. “It's either shovelling documents or finding a way of letting someone else access your systems,” he says.
But the latter option, he acknowledges, is enormously complex - which is why so many companies revert to the former, paper-based approach. Those that do experiment with opening up their IT systems to third parties, he adds, quickly find that “there are essentially hundreds of ways of doing it.”
Web services, he says, is the best way of exposing business software to date. Web services provides a set of standard tools for exposing business processes over the Internet in such a way that organisations can cease to worry about interoperability issues, and concentrate on the best way to conduct collaborative business processes.
Connell is not alone in this belief. In fact, most of the major vendors and B2B platform developers have announced plans to add web services interfaces to their products. In time, they claim, this will enable computers to select the best suppliers, place orders, and authorise payments without the need for human intervention.
This has been the goal of collaborative software packages for some time. However, early B2B platforms based on proprietary technology did not provide a standard way to collaborate, resulting in incompatibilities between different systems. Companies had to agree to work in the same way and use the same standards to link these platforms, resulting in many companies sticking with tried and tested electronic collaboration technologies such as electronic data interchange (EDI).
So are web services capable of meeting all the requirements of B2B transactions? Are they secure? Do they have all the features necessary for every industry and marketplace?
Future perfect?
The answer to all three questions is the same: not yet. In short, web services technology is not yet sufficiently mature to have tackled these issues in more than a cursory manner. “Web services is the way that people will connect in future,” claims David Burdett, director of product management for web services at B2B software company, Commerce One. “But basic SOAP is not going to be enough,” he adds.
Among the main obstacles that need to be addressed by suppliers providing web services-based products are issues of security, authentication, 'choreography' and data format.
At the moment, web services traffic is unencrypted text, meaning that anyone can intercept the data once it is outside the firewall and read it. Without an authentication standard, they can then alter the data and send it on to its destination. As a result, the recipient has no idea if it has come directly from the right source, or been tampered with on that journey.
Without transaction 'choreography', there is no way to monitor the progress of complex transactions. In the case of a transaction that takes a long time or is particularly complicated - one that requires human intervention in order for a credit check to be performed, for example - the system will be unsure of the correct order in which it should be processed. And equally importantly, unless trading partners agree on how they define data - if two companies use different codes for their products but label them both 'product ID', for instance - there will be no chance of automatic collaboration and each transaction will have to be handled manually.
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