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October 10, 2003

Web Services: It's About Connections

What do Web services really mean for your organization? The most important effect will be a blurring of internal and external services, spurring a need for new architecture. Thanks to competition, the result will be higher-quality software carried by connected services

by Douglas K. Barry

Continued from Page 2

In the AV industry, when many television manufacturers were first converting to printed circuit boards, Zenith ran a series of ads promoting that they still had people in their manufacturing plants hand-soldering electronic components for their television sets. Well, those handcrafting days are gone. Many traditional programming jobs will go the same way.

Some organizations may find that they have unique services to offer. IT staff will be needed to create those services. Nevertheless, there will be fewer jobs involving custom development.

With the eventual standardization of services, it will become easier to replace one packaged service with another — just as you can generally replace one AV receiver component with another that has more capabilities. This should be a clarion call to software vendors to improve the quality of their products. Organizations will have fewer reasons to put up with inferior software products if it is relatively easy to swap in a service from a different vendor. Plug-compatibility means that services can be swapped out.

Why Start Now?

Some hold the opinion that you don't need to look at Web services until they have another organization as a partner for exchanging business data. Although this may be true for particularly small organizations, it's not true for many others. Don't assume that Web services are simply for exchanging data with other organizations. No, Web services are about connections. And you can make those connections in your own organization.

Of course, very small organizations may need to wait until their vendors, accounting system, or contact manager provide a way to take advantage of Web services.

For midsized to large organizations, applying the concepts and standards of Web services to internal systems serves two purposes. First, it is a means to simplify internal data interchanges. Second, it allows your organization to gain expertise in Web services. Should the opportunity present itself, your organization might then be able to provide a service to other organizations, or your organization might be able to take advantage of the services provided by other organizations.

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The message here is that if you haven't prepared yourself, you won't be ready when the opportunity arrives.

Douglas K. Barry principal at Barry & Associates, is an author, speaker, and consultant in software architecture, standards, and product selection. He specializes in databases, systems integration, and Web services. He can be reached at doug@barryandassociates.com.

Footnotes:

This article is excerpted and adapted from Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures: The Savvy Manager's Guide (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2003). Printed by permission.

1. Serious audiophiles will point out that an RCA connector is not necessarily the highest performing option. In fact, that is why RCA connectors make for a good analogy to using XML in Web services. XML is also not the highest performing way to communicate. Nevertheless, much like an RCA connector, XML is undergoing standardization in ways that — when used with SOAP — will be as ubiquitous.

2. Service-oriented architectures aren't new. The first service-oriented architecture for many people in the past was DCOM or Object Request Brokers based on the CORBA specification.

3. The standardization of services will see competition on either price or innovative features. Continuing with the AV analogy, this is what we see with various AV components — competition on either price or features.