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December 5, 2001

Hub Connection

The future of Web services will rely on channels or hubs that connect service providers to end users

Stewart McKie

Web services are all the rage these days. Gartner Inc. claims that by 2006, 50 percent of midsize and large businesses will rely on Web services. Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems have all announced initiatives to help catalyze the technology infrastructure for building, deploying, and delivering Web services. What's clear is that Web services, in some form or another, are set to become an important part of the way businesses will leverage technology to secure competitive advantage. And a key player in the Web services landscape is the Web service hub — an online marketplace for locating and delivering Web services.

Let's get some basic terminology out of the way (see Figure 1). A Web service is functionality delivered to a service consumer, such as an individual, employee, or business process, by a service provider. Although a service consumer obtaining services directly from the service provider is a practical option today, this practice is unlikely to be the norm in the future. As Web services proliferate, intermediaries — namely Web service hubs — will insert themselves between service consumers and providers. These hubs act as agents, brokers, marketplaces, and channels for marketing and delivering Web services to the end user.

HUBBA, HUBBA, HUBBA

Three types of Web service hubs already exist: service-to-consumer (S2C), service-to-employee (S2E), and service-to-business (S2B). America Online (AOL) is an example of an S2C hub. It delivers services, such as an Internet on-ramp, email, and chat, to individuals. An S2E hub is already in place in most major corporations — it's called an intranet. And most intranets not only deliver internal information and services but also typically include external content-related Web services such as travel and weather reports, news feeds, book buying, and so forth. And some businesses already participate in S2B hubs known as extranets or online marketplaces.

A Web service hub has a clearly defined role in the Web services landscape. It aggregates services to meet the needs of a specific user group. A Web service hub has a user interface, called a portal, that lets you search, evaluate, subscribe, use, manage, and monitor services. The hub has a many-to-one-to-many role in that it delivers many service consumers to many service providers. In this way it's no different from any online marketplace operating today that delivers many buyers to many suppliers.

What about universal description, discovery and integration (UDDI) of business for the Web? UDDI is an initiative backed by Ariba Inc., IBM, Microsoft, and others to make Web services visible to businesses via a publicly accessible directory and to make those services accessible through application programming interfaces (APIs) based on XML. UDDI, if it gains critical mass, could become an important Web service hub in its own right, but only as a kind of horizontal intermediary between vertical Web service hubs and the service providers whose Web services are registered in the UDDI directory.

MICROSOFT'S HUB STRATEGY

Because it's a major Web services evangelist, reviewing what Microsoft is doing in terms of S2C, S2E, and S2B hubs is useful. Currently, Microsoft is in a titanic struggle with AOL to make its MSN portal the dominant S2C hub on the Internet. Microsoft designed the recently announced .Net My Services, formerly Hailstorm, initiative to make building the types of services that target the consumer easier for developers. Think of MSN as Visual Basic (VB) and My Services as VB components, and you'll get the idea. Then there is Office XP, the latest Web-savvy release of Microsoft's desktop productivity suite. XP is nothing less than an S2E hub in disguise — a Web services Trojan horse — because once XP is resident on most corporate desktops, it becomes a way to deliver a wide range of Web services directly to employees using the new Smart Tags technology.