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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“There are a lot of people kicking tyres,” says Larry Alston, CTO of XML-database developer Excelon. “But there are not a lot with experience of building large-scale asynchronous programs - and that's one of the major bars to adoption.” Excelon pitches its database technology as a way to overcome some of these problems. It can, says Alston, sit on the firewall, acting as a recorder for all web services traffic. It can also create an audit trail for transactions.
The edge of the network is also where Commerce One is positioning its new product, Commerce One Conductor, an “interoperability engine” for web services that will address the issues of security and data transformation, among others. “It can take data coming in from B2B marketplaces, EDI or web services and change the data from one schema to another,” says Commerce One's Burdett. It also uses the draft WS-Security standard for security, although this will change as the standards evolve.
“We recognise that web services technology is not yet mature, but that will change over time. Security will change and whatever becomes standard we will adopt, maintaining backward compatibility all the time.” The system will maintain a registry of the standards that trading partners use to transfer data - be they ebXML, web services with WS-Security, .Net or Rosettanet - and use the appropriate standards to communicate with them.
But picking those standards may be difficult. Gartner's Abrams says that, already, there are too many standards. “We need consolidation, but we don't have it yet.” He cites the example of a consulting project for one commercial vendor that he has just completed that had service clients with 150 XML specifications, all of which were 'standards'.
Some consolidation is occurring. IBM recently dropped its web services flow language and Microsoft put aside its own XLANG flow language in favour of the jointly developed business process execution language for web services. But other companies will have to abandon their own proprietary technologies before these standards acquire the same stature as SOAP, WSDL and UDDI.
Nevertheless, says Abrams, despite the lack of a complete web services solution, every company needs to be considering web services, particularly in their own vertical industries. Otherwise, he says, they will find themselves deploying in a hurry when it is too late. Rather than worry about collaborating with all their partners, they should concentrate on collaborating with the 10% of their customers that generally account for 80% of their revenue.
Pressure to keep up with Microsoft and other industry leaders is forcing B2B platform vendors to adapt their products to provide web services capabilities. Now web services has to meet the pace set by the suppliers if its adoption by the B2B world is to be anything more than perfunctory.
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