Microsoft, IBM, BEA Merge Web Services Standards

By Maria Trombly | Securities Industry News | August 26, 2002

Although the core Web services standards have been defined and universally adopted by vendors, higher-level standards have been a mess, with each vendor putting forward a different solution. Firms wanting to use Web services to integrate back-office applications, produce Web applications, or to do business with partners have been forced to either limit their applications, adopt one of the proprietary, vendor-specific standards or wait until next year, when the W3C is expected to release the next round of Web services standards.

That is, until now.

In the next release of IBM's Web services platform, called WebSphere, the company will start to implement a set of higher-order Web services standards developed jointly with competitors BEA and Microsoft. BEA will also implement the standards in its WebLogic platform, and Microsoft will support them in its .Net development platform. Competing Web services platform provider Sun Microsystems was noticeably absent from the announcement.

All four are common platforms for Wall Street Web services development. BEA customers include all the Fortune Global 500 Financial Securities companies-including Charles Schwab, Credit Suisse First Boston, J.P. Morgan Chase, John Hancock, Lehman Bros., Morgan Stanley, Visa and Wells Fargo.

IBM's WebSphere is used by 75 percent of the top commercial banks, and 15 of the top Wall Street brokerage firms, including Charles Schwab, ABN Amro and TD Bank.

There's a lot of overlap-many firms use BEA to run a department and IBM to run their infrastructure. IBM and BEA have built their platforms on the Java programming language from Sun Microsystems. As a result, their platforms are dominant when it comes to enterprise integration, where Java is a major force.

Microsoft's .Net is best known for the ease and speed of deploying customer-facing and Windows-based Web services. Some firms, including Charles Schwab, use multiple platforms simultaneously. One common approach is to use .Net for the front end of a Web services and a Java-based platform for the back end. With universal standards, the Web services should work together seamlessly. That has been true in the past for simple applications-and may now hold for complex ones.

The new, joint standards will replace the proprietary standards that the three companies had been working on independently, including IBM's WSFL and Microsoft's XLANG.

The new standards are WS-Coordination, WS-Transaction and BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services).
The standards will let organizations coordinate Web services applications within the enterprise and with partners and customers-regardless of which operating system or development platform was used to create them.

"This is a huge step forward," said Karla Norsworthy, director of dynamic e-business technologies at IBM. "It brings a lot of things to Web services that are needed to solve real business problems."

The basic Web services standards --UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration), WSDL (Web Services Description Language) and Soap (Simple Object Access Protocol)-work well for one-step processes, or processes in which the steps can be performed independently.

But if a process requires several different Web services to work together-and every single step needs to be completed in order for the process to go forward-then the new standards come in to keep things straight.

"This is a positive move by the three vendors toward achieving an interoperable solution industrywide," said Dushyant Shahrawat, an analyst at Needham, Mass.-based TowerGroup. "But any Web services initiative needs to involve a wider cross-section of vendors. What about Sun? That's a major vendor."

Sun Microsystems is working on a competing standard, WSCI (Web Services Choreography Interface), which it submitted to the W3C last week.

However, BPEL4WS seems to have the big guns behind it, according to Boston-based Aberdeen Group analysts Darcy Fowkes and Tim Sloane.

The BPEL4WS standard is likely to become dominant within two to four years, they said, unless further escalation occurs and WSCI adherents gain new market support and can rapidly introduce products based on the standard.

However, according to IBM, a number of software-development companies-including i2 Technologies, J.D. Edwards & Co., PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems. and Vitria Technology-have come out in support of the BPEL4WS standard.

"The new specifications . . . fill the current gap when creating reliable, dependable, enterprise-rich Web services business processes," said Lenley Hensarling, vice president of product management at J.D. Edwards in a statement. "We believe these specifications could enable us to reach further into the Web services space."

In the fourth quarter of this year, Norsworthy added, the new standards will be submitted to a standards body for approval.