Web Services Strategies
Beyond the technology, IT strategies for implementation of Web services by Doug Kaye.
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Fear and Loathing. In his editorial this week, InfoWorld editor in chief Michael Vizard suggests that, "...the concept of web services is downright frightening to [large ISVs], because it opens up the entire best-of-breed can of worms again." Michael continues, "With the advent of web services and corporate portal technologies, much of the rationale for purchasing application suites from specific vendors is going to disappear...The one place you hear broad support for web services is among providers of specialized applications seeking to integrate their offerings with larger sets of applications." If true, this may justify the existence of the cross-platform integration vendors. Otherwise, they're dead.
Posted Wednesday, March 20, 2002 6:22:10 PM 
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CitiBank to use Microsoft Passport. This looks like an important announcement. "Citigroup will use two of the .Net technologies: Passport, a password authentication service, and .Net Alerts. The Passport service will allow customers to be authenticated by Citigroup when making purchases online or accessing personal data. The Alerts service will be used to provide people with custom information online." [Sources: Pelle Braendgaard's Financial Applications Security Weblog, and Dave Winer's Scripting News]
Posted Wednesday, March 20, 2002 2:51:02 PM
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Semantic Contexts. I'm still catching up on some excellent web-services analyses written nearly half a year ago. In response to the "It's So Crazy..." article by Clay Shirky, Julian bond posted this essay last October. Reading both articles, one realizes (or realises, in Julian's case) they're both right. Clay claims the web-services stack doesn't address the semantic context necessary to implement integration of two business entities. Julian at first seems to disagree, but instead goes on to describe the types of efforts underway to create those required semantic standards. Yes, they're above and beyond the web-services stack, and they include industry-specific efforts such as Rosettanet for the electronics industry, the mapping of competing standards such as Microsoft is attemptint to do with Biztalk, or through de facto standards such as via QuickBooks or Microsoft's Great Plains accounting package as I mentioned a few days ago.
Posted Wednesday, March 20, 2002 2:37:09 PM
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Now is Not the Time. Gartner security analyst John Pescatore predicts this year will bring at least one major IT security problem that exploits a web-services vulnerability. He suggests, "Now isn't the time to jump on the web-services bandwagon." Information Week writer George V. Hulme sums it up, "Until that fear is overcome, the hoped-for revolution from web services will have to wait."
Posted Wednesday, March 20, 2002 10:38:17 AM
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Web Services From Another Planet. I'm not a pessimist—really, I'm not. But I am on a quest to find the truth about web services. Two vendors have already told me I'm too negative, but when I asked them, "Show me," I heard nothing back. I keep reading amazing things about web services in various trade publications, but I haven't yet been able to find examples like these on my own. And it's not for lack of trying. Here's an example from this week's issue of Information Week:
"Behind his [Tony Scott, GM's CTO] enthusiasm is the fact that any application incorporating Web-services standards—SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, and XML—can automatically discover and connect with others based on those same standards."
"Jose De La Torre [...] whose firm does Web-services consulting for the auto industry, says he doesn't see any of the major software vendors lagging when it comes to support for Web-services standards. 'We've worked with everything out there and it does appearly truly interoperable,' he says."
I must be living on another planet. None (!) of the CIOs, CTOs and developers I've spoken with who are in the trenches trying to make disparate systems communicate are finding this to be true. In a nutshell, the standards either don't yet exist, or they're too much in flux. Anyone out there finding it easy?
Posted Wednesday, March 20, 2002 12:12:33 AM
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