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March 8, 2002

Ready, Set, Compete

Web services promise to fill gaps in strategic business apps for the purpose of collaborative commerce. How can you take advantage?

By Stewart McKie

Continued from Page 1

Online marketplaces are another e-business area where you would expect these kinds of Web services to become the norm. Clearly, one factor that has held back the success of online marketplaces in general is their lack of tight integration with back-end systems.

PREPARING FOR WEB SERVICES BPA

How can you prepare to make sure your business can benefit from this next wave in BPA? First, you should examine the business processes you currently manage within your CRM, ERP, or SCM systems and perform some simple gap analysis. Where are the functional gaps today? What could you add to your system to enhance or extend the process? If you could add one key function to change the process, what would it be?

With this analysis under your belt, when your vendors start evangelizing Web services, you'll be ready to give them some useful input. You could also try using an existing Web service by attempting a custom link from within your application using the application's internal customization scripting language, just to get a feel for it and understand the value proposition better.

Unfortunately, there aren't that many Web services available today that are ready to complement strategic business apps for BPA. Many of the Web services found on public directory sites are simple demos of ZIP Code lookups or credit card verification. That's not to say that they couldn't be used for BPA, but just that they are not commercial services targeted at businesses that are concerned about security, availability, integrity, and reliability. Furthermore, many functions and applications labelled as Web services are nothing of the sort because they don't offer an API to permit programming access.

Web services will potentially drive the next wave in business automation, if only by enhancing or extending processes already automated within existing product investments. But meeting that goal will require the vendors of strategic business applications to accept the burden of providing the means to integrate Web services into their applications and create the service broker hubs to deliver these services to a private community of service consumers. Relying on public service directories to enable this capability will certainly fail. (See the sidebar, "Web Services and Collaboative Commerce").

Finally, data exchange and transformation services offer the promise to change the face of collaborative commerce by making it easier for smaller businesses to participate in electronic supply chains and helping to prevent the current lack of one standard data exchange protocol from hindering progress.

Stewart McKie [cfoinfo@btinternet.com] is an independent software analyst and author of Web Services: A Manager's Guide, which is available from www.contentcan.com.

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JUMPING ON THE BANDWAGON

Few, if any, strategic business application vendors have made existing functionality available as Web services, and most do not provide any built-in integration even with third-party Web services. But they are beginning to lay the foundation for both by adding some Web service integration tools to their platforms.

Late last year, SAP announced mySAP technology, an infrastructure bundle including a Web application server plus data exchange and portal integration capabilities. The idea is that this infrastructure will make it easier for users of the mySAP ERP suite to take advantage of Web services delivered using Java, Microsoft.Net, and SAP's own ABAP technology.
Oracle has been pushing the software-as-service concept for some time and claims that the Oracle 9iAS Web Services release for its Oracle RDBMS lets developers develop, describe, publish, and invoke Web services. Oracle has even begun a program to help independent software vendors convert their software product assets into Web services that could then be utilized by Oracle's enterprise application suite. But this won't be easy: For the resellers, the transition from delivering products to becoming service providers is likely to prove just as challenging as the transition from the "box shifting" of the 1980s to the "solution selling" of the 1990s.
CRM leader Siebel Systems Inc. is also not ignoring the promise of Web services for enhancing the customer relationship process. Siebel 7's XML Web Interface is intended to let Siebel applications to talk to other XML-aware applications, and additional adapters are available to facilitate working with data transformation and Web service delivery platforms such as Microsoft BizTalk and WebMethods.

The few enterprise application vendors who took the trouble to truly componentize their product functionality may now see some real payback. That's because they are in a good position to quickly exploit the momentum toward Web services by wrapping these components with a "service interface," hosting them on the Internet, and then selling them to their existing user base on a new recurring revenue subscription basis.

WEB SERVICES AND COLLABORATIVE COMMERCE

Until recently, collaborative commerce was essentially defined by electronic data interchange (EDI) and the technology products needed to enable EDI among business partners. But Web services focused on data exchange and transformation will certainly become a key part of collaborative commerce in the near future.

IBM already offers a Web service called Web data transfer (a component of IBM Interchange Services) that acts as a hub for any-to-any format data exchange among business partners that are registered with the hub. IBM claims that trading partners of the business that acts as the "hub company" (with whom the trading partners collaborate) need no more technology than a Web browser and an Internet connection to collaborate commercially. IBM also offers Forms exchange, another service for translating data captured in forms (either on the Web or in applications) to and from standard EDI formats.

Another collaborative commerce service of interest to businesses focused on Microsoft technology, in particular BizTalk Server, is iWay Software's BizTalk Adapter offering that can connect businesses with a locally installed BizTalk Server to a variety of other data systems, applications, and XML-based document exchanges that use formats such as SWIFT, EDI, or cXML. The product also includes a Web services engine that can interface with remote Web services via standard interfaces such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Web Services Definition language. The iWay Adapter offering is not a Web service itself (although it may be offered as one in the future) but one way of exchanging data with other Web services if you already use BizTalk Server as part of your supply chain management process.

DataConcert's data transformation Web service provides a Web hub for uploading, executing, and storing data transformations on a public and private basis that includes transforming to and from a xCBL invoice or Great Plains Software (a popular midtier ERP system) invoice. These transformations can be achieved programmatically using a SOAP request and response document, meaning that the service could be called to effect these transformations from within a supply chain process that receives or sends documents to or from a trading partner.

One common theory to explain the limited acceptance of EDI is the complexity and cost of installing and maintaining EDI products for small-business trading partners. Perhaps services such as those I've described represent a solution to that problem.