As Standards Evolve, Platforms Improve

By Maria Trombly | Securities Industry News | May 5, 2003

As Web services standards evolve, so do the platforms that Wall Street firms use to develop them. This year, Microsoft, IBM, BEA and Sun Microsystems are expanding on their basic Web services development frameworks to offer support for the latest security and transaction protocols, improve Web services coordination, and add more management tools. Any of the four platforms-Microsoft's .Net, IBM's WebSphere, BEA's WebLogic and Sun's Sun ONE-will produce a Web service that will work with any of the others at the basic level, determined by the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) organization.

Since its formation in February 2002, more than 170 companies have joined WS-I. Although Microsoft, IBM, BEA and Sun are all on the board, there is a strong presence of user companies-including Wall Street firms such as Merrill Lynch, Fidelity and Charles Schwab.

If problems occur, they are likely to happen with the highest-order functionality, where standards haven't yet been determined and the four vendors are making educated guesses about the direction they will go.

Microsoft has made a big bet on .Net, which is a framework to build Web services on the Windows operating system. On April 24, Microsoft released its latest version, Windows Server 2003. The .Net has been dropped from the title, but it will still let you develop and deploy Web services. To manage Web services once they're out there, Microsoft is updating its BizTalk Server, which is also now based around XML and Web services. Before, the BizTalk environment gave precedence to a proprietary messaging standard.

BizTalk Server 2003, due out late this year, makes Web services a first-class citizen, said Scott Garvey, director of Redmond- Wash.-based Microsoft's Web services marketing.

"We are re-plumbing our products so that XML and Web services are at the core of our products," he said. "We have invested billions of dollars to reengineer our product lines."

In addition, Office 11, to be released this summer, will include support for XML. That means that Excel, for example, will be able to import XML data files.
Microsoft's flagship database product, SQL Server, already supports XML but the next version, code named Yukon, promises to put XML right at its core.
Since Windows is ubiquitous in the business world, many firms already have the in-house expertise needed to develop .Net Web services. Those that have already done so include Bear Stearns, the London Stock Exchange, Pershing United Kingdom, the Nasdaq Stock Market, and Bank of New York's European Fund Services Group.

Unlike Microsoft's .Net, the rest of the Web services platform vendors aren't tied to any one particular operating system. The messages they send and receive are Soap (Simple Object Access Protocol), the same as in .Net, but the actual applications within the Web services are written in Java and can run anywhere, including on Windows servers.

IBM's Web services development platform is called WebSphere, and the company claims 21-percent revenue growth for the product in 2002. WebSphere consists of a number of interrelated pieces-foundation and tools, the application server, the development platform, the portal server, and the business integration product.

According to IBM, each one of the top 45 commercial and savings banks use the WebSphere Application Server. Customers include ABN Amro, J.P. Morgan Chase, CIBC and Wachovia. Many companies, however, use several development platforms simultaneously for Web services work.

This year, IBM has continued to work on expanding the capabilities of its Web services to include higher order functionality, such as support for security, transactions and business process standards. For example, Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM has joined forces with Microsoft and BEA, based in San Jose, Calif., to develop BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services), pronounced BEE-pel.

"We have BPEL capability in our products today, already on the market," said Stefan Van Overtveldt, IBM's director of WebSphere market strategy. "It's not a full implementation yet, but it's close to getting there. We will have that full functionality on the market toward year-end."

Meanwhile, support for WS-Transactions and WS-Coordination is already built in, Van Overtveldt said. And a preview of WS-Security has been available since September. A final version will be out this summer in an update for WebSphere application server 5.1.

Of particular benefit to Wall Street firms, said Van Overtveldt, is IBM's ability to take existing applications and turn them into Web services-even decades-old legacy apps written in C++, Smalltalk or Cobol.

And it's not just scraping information off green-screen interfaces, he added.
"The screen scraping is the worst possible scenario," he said. "It's the step of last resort."

Instead, he said, IBM uses a suite of technologies first developed to help firms cope with Y2K to go into an application, find input and output fields, create a description of how an application functions-and then build a Web service to access it.

"This is true reach into an application," he said.

Screen-scraping is only necessary when neither the original source code nor the original programmers are available, he added.

BEA Systems has just released a beta version of its WebLogic platform 8.1, with the final version expected out this summer. Like IBM, BEA Web services are built on the Java platform and are popular on Wall Street-the company counts all of the top 10 Wall Street firms as customers.

According to John Kiger, BEA's director of Web services strategy, the new release includes an implementation of the emerging WS-Security standard and WS-Reliable Messaging, which ensures that Web services messages actually get to where they're supposed to be going.

"Today, there is nothing in the Web services technologies that can provide assurance that the message is actually delivered," Kiger said. "You can imagine the challenge of implementing a transactional Web services without being sure that a message is actually delivered."

In addition, he said, WebLogic Platform 8.1 and WebLogic Integration 8.1 support business process management. "You can build a business process using a visual tool by assembling applications, data and other processes in your environment," said Kiger. "Then you can expose that business process as a Web service, so that other developers and applications in your business can easily interact with that business process."

Although the Sun Solaris operating system is a popular choice on Wall Street, and Sun originated the Java programming language, the company is playing catch-up with its Web services development platform, Sun One. In fact, customers who buy Solaris servers even get a trial version of BEA WebLogic as part of the package. That doesn't mean Sun isn't committed to Sun One, said Drew Engstrom, Sun's senior market strategist for Web services, but Sun One does have a late start. Sun became a board member of WS-I just this March.

And the Sun One Web services development platform was only released about a month ago. The Sun One Application Server 7 is an entirely new product, Engstrom said, completely rewritten from iPlanet 6, which it replaced.
The Sun One platform edition is included free with Solaris. The enterprise edition, which will include some load balancing and scalability, is due out this summer.

On the plus side, Sun One does include support from ebXML (e-business XML), which provides secure messaging and nonrepudiation, as well as the Liberty Alliance's SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language), a federated way of confirming identity.

Sun One doesn't include support for WS-Security yet, Engstrom said, but he promised that when the standard is finalized, it will be included in the platform.

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