WebSphere Upgraded But Hindered by Standards Gap

By Maria Trombly | Securities Industry News | Dec. 9, 2002

Billed as offering better security, business process work flow and management tools, IBM's new WebSphere Application Server version 5 (WSAS 5), released on Nov. 25, lets companies better integrate their business processes across the enterprise and with partners, suppliers and customers. But it's still a partial solution. The general lack of common standards for security and complex transaction processing means this latest release still requires some negotiations between partners.

"That's not due to any fault of IBM, but because the standards are still being developed," said Michele Rosen, an analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based International Data Corp.

Financial services firms pressing ahead with external Web services deployments have to use workarounds. Often, these include preexisting proprietary communication systems set up between partners or new secure connections such as virtual private networks.

"The Bank of Nova Scotia is using Web services as an interface to a client application that they provide for use to their wholesale banking customers," said Michael Gilpin, an analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Giga Information Group. "They already had a cash management application that the customers didn't like. What they did is rescue the existing security infrastructure, and plug in the Web services underneath."

WebSphere 5 does offer security advancements, including a "gatekeeper" mechanism that checks incoming Web services requests for legitimacy before allowing them in through a company's firewall. That can block hackers who may try to exploit Web services to get access to a company's internal systems, Stephan Van Overtveldt, director of technology marketing for IBM WebSphere, said.

IBM's latest WebSphere release can offer significant advantages in creating, deploying and managing Web services, said IDC's Rosen.
"If a company was building applications designed to leverage existing functionality, or for the sake of integrating existing functionality in a meta application, this would certainly make it easier to develop," she said.

WSAS 5 also makes Web services more reliable. The basic Web services standard-Soap (Simple Object Access Protocol) over HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol)-does not automatically check whether a Web services request has been received, for example, and whether it has only been received once.

"This is important when you're dealing with financial transactions," Van Overtveldt said. "To enable that you need a much more reliable protocol. So we've enabled Web services communications over other protocols, including MQ Series and the Java messaging protocols. It looks and feels like a complete standards-based environment, but under the covers it uses a much more reliable communications protocol."

Finally, the latest version makes it easier for firms to build, deploy and manage Web services, helping IBM catch up to BEA, which had earlier support for J2EE, for example.

"We've enabled a lot of what we call autonomic computing features," said Van Overtveldt. "WebSphere Application Server becomes a lot more self-sufficient. It can optimize itself. It can configure itself. It has self-healing features and can predict when a failure may occur and prevent that failure from happening. It can significantly reduce the costs of operations."

Another advance is that WSAS 5 supports Axis, a Web services technology that makes it possible to process Web services requests three or four times faster than currently possible.

According to Van Overtveldt, the new features in WSAS 5 are completely compatible with the standards openly available in the Web services space, or have been donated to the open source community, or have been proposed as open standards to standards-setting bodies.

The proprietary features that WSAS 5 offers-such as better deployment tools-help on the back end, making it easier to produce and manage Web services. For example, the business work flow functionality built into the WSAS enterprise edition can enable a firm to more easily define a business process and implement a work flow that combines internal legacy applications, newly developed applications, and applications from business partners. Then the resulting work flow can be exposed both within and outside the enterprise as a standard Web service.

The end-users of the Web services, whether internal or external, don't have to be using IBM's platform in order to be able to connect.
However, IBM is still behind Microsoft's .Net platform when it comes to the quality of its toolset. "Microsoft has a great advantage in tools, in particular in the ease of use and productivity," said Giga's Gilpin. "Which, frankly, none of the J2EE vendors can match."