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October 10, 2003

BSP First-to-Market Opportunity

Many businesses are taking advantage of the Web services architecture to become business service providers (BSPs). Before jumping headfirst onto the BSP bandwagon, it's important to understand, articulate, locate, and pilot your service offering. Here's how.

by Stewart McKie

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Locating Your Service

Web services can be exposed for use in many ways. If you provide services within your firewall, a Web server/application server combination may be all you need to make functions or content that's already accessible via your corporate network available as Web services. If you anticipate offering a wide range of Web services, however, you should consider whether it's worth setting up your own Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) server to act as a central service directory. All the industry leaders — including IBM, Microsoft, Novell, and Sun Microsystems — now offer technology to set up and manage UDDI servers.

A UDDI server can be set up for private, partner, or public use. Private UDDI servers located within a firewall are used to offer "intranet" Web services. Partner UDDI servers can be federated across corporate firewalls to offer "extranet" Web services — for example, as the basis for business partner process collaboration. Public UDDI servers — such as the UDDI "nodes" managed by IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and others — make Web services easier to discover by the public across the Internet. If UDDI continues to gain traction in the corporate IT environment, we could see a UDDI server in every BSP, either acting alone or in federation with other UDDI servers over the Internet.

Maybe you don't want to host and manage your own Web service offering, or perhaps you need an easier way to create Web service orchestrations within your business or across your business partner community. If so, a better option could be to use a hosting service partner such as Grand Central Communications or offer your service via a service broker hub such as Microsoft Business Solutions' Navision VIP or bCentral. You already have some choice in terms of how to locate and offer your Web service, and there will undoubtedly be more choice in the future.

Piloting Your Service

Piloting any new offering is clearly common sense, but it's even more important for "newbie" BSPs, for whom Web service providing is a brand new line of business. As such, it must be fully validated ahead of time. A limited pilot of your service with a small group of trusted stakeholders — internal service evangelists, collaborative business partners, or opted-in consumers for example — will help you make a more informed go/no-go decision.

In order to validate your service proposition, your service pilot should have some specific objectives. First, monitoring usage patterns will help you spot any obvious peaks or troughs that could expose service scalability and availability problems. Second, the pilot will help you better identify the true costs of providing the service. And third, by actively soliciting stakeholder feedback on the service, you'll be able to refine the service value proposition, drive improvement, and better understand how to price (or not price) your service.

To run a pilot, you need an easy way for people to sign up for the service — perhaps through an existing portal or corporate Web site. To monitor your pilot service, you'll need tools such as those provided by Flamenco Networks or Metapa Inc. These tools log service activity and supply this data to a separate service data warehouse, which serves as the basis for service analytics and reporting.

Depending on your particular type of service offering, you may want to create a few key performance indicators at the pilot stage to monitor your service performance against your warehouse data. And if you want to get useful feedback other than just via a "disconnected" Web site form, you'll need to find some way of capturing feedback at the point of service delivery. Otherwise, you may get no valuable feedback at all.

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I've scratched only the surface of what it means from a business perspective to become a BSP. Start by understanding why being a BSP could make sense for your business, and spend time to fully understand and articulate your service proposition. Before developing your service, think about where to locate it and how it could be delivered. And before making it available, invest in the kind of pilot that will tell you if being a BSP is the right thing for your business. Web services are here. For almost every business today, deciding whether or not to become a BSP is a valid management pursuit.

Stewart McKie is an independent consultant and technology writer specializing in analytic, enterprise resource management, and Web services applications. Reach him via his Web site at www.cfoinfo.com