Simple services
- Article 1 of 1
- Spotlight on e-partnerships, March 2002
How will web services standards enable organisations to build interfaces to their key business applications?
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Integration problems are among the greatest obstacles to business-to-business (B2B) collaboration. Companies might as well replace their costly collaborative systems with fax machines if they cannot exchange data seamlessly across organisational boundaries.
For IT managers, enabling applications to exchange data automatically is a constant challenge. But whether an IT department programs these interfaces in house or buys enterprise application integration (EAI) tools from vendors such as Tibco, SeeBeyond and WebMethods, often the resulting system is costly to maintain, cumbersome and based on proprietary technology. Web services promise to change that.
“Web services are fundamental to change to application architecture,” says Ian Howells, vice president of marketing for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at integration tools vendor SeeBeyond. “They provide standardised interfaces to underlying applications. They reduce the number of connectors needed between applications to integrate them. They reduce the cost of roll-out.”
Kristin Weller, senior vice president of product development at webMethods, a rival integration software specialist, echoes Howells' enthusiasm for web services-based integration. “A hundred per cent of our effort is going into supporting web services,” she says.
But the adoption of web services is a radical shift for companies such as SeeBeyond and WebMethods. Toolsets from these companies typically include: a number of proprietary adaptors that connect to standard and customised business applications, extract data and pass instructions; a central 'hub' to which these connectors join and through which they exchange information, which the hub may translate into data the other systems can understand; and a message protocol for all these communications.
NEW STANDARDS
Web services replace much of this proprietary technology with a new set of standards. An application with a web services interface can respond to XML (extensible mark-up language) messages sent using the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and it can describe that interface to other systems using the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). A Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) repository acts as a directory, listing all the services available. Most EAI suppliers have used their own technology to do this, with some support for industry standards such as XML.
But how does replacing one set of technologies and standards with others help systems 'talk' to each other more easily? “It lowers costs,” explains Aditya Shivram, director of product marketing at EAI tool vendor Tibco. “If the applications themselves expose their functions in a standard way, you don't have to create or buy adaptors.”
Before web services, enterprise software vendors had no single standard to write to. As a result companies such as Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, Siebel, Microsoft and Great Plains could do little more than recommend EAI tools to customers or make their own interfaces available for others to write to. But with all these suppliers - and others - updating their applications to provide web services interfaces, these suppliers will effectively supply an EAI tool straight out of the box that will need little or no configuration beyond a mouse click to enable it.
Shivram argues that by providing these interfaces, application vendors create an environment where application integration is far more achievable, even for customers who could not afford integration projects before. “For any integration project, if the benefits outweigh the costs, they'll do it,” he says. “As soon as you lower the cost of integration, projects that might not have happened become affordable.”
Equally important in a B2B setting, says Shivram, is the ability to do this kind of integration over the Internet, with partners', customers' and suppliers' applications and systems - although few companies are yet that advanced.
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