Application Choices Abound In Web-Services MarketApplication Choices Abound In Web-Services Market

While big-league IT vendors play a game of one-upmanship in the emerging Web-services market, a host of smaller companies are selling a new breed of application-integration tool.

A number of companies, including Bowstreet, Cacheon, Cape Clear Software, Grand Central Networks, Killdara, and VelociGen are working to deliver a new set of application development and integration applications based on Web-services standards. The opportunity for small vendors is in selling integration tools that leverage the more advanced Web-services technologies, while large vendors such as BEA Systems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems are focused on building Web-services support into existing products.

If companies already use IBM's WebSphere application server, then it makes sense to use other IBM technology, too. "But if they have something brand new they want to do, then there's no reason not to look at the small vendors as an alternative," says Roddy Henderson, CEO of Wellfound Technology Inc., an Atlanta systems integrator that specializes in Web-services deployments and business-process automation.

Web-services marketers focus primarily on the technology's potential for providing a standard integration platform over the Internet. The vision is to have Web applications seamlessly access and exchange data. For example, if an airline flight that was booked via the Web is delayed, the customer's calendar could be automatically adjusted, E-mails could be sent to reschedule meetings, and a car-rental office could be notified of a change in pickup time.

Many IT companies are starting to use Web-services technologies for behind-the-firewall application-to-application integration in small, less crucial projects.

The small tool vendors provide a relatively inexpensive alternative to more robust enterprise application integration software that might be considered overkill for their particular types of projects. "We have an opportunity to do things that just wouldn't have been done before," Henderson says. Many new applications being built with Web services incorporate application data from existing systems along with new business logic.

RoTech Medical Corp. is using VelociGen tools to take data from its mainframe billing system and make it available to customer-service representatives on the company's intranet. The project is being tested and is expected to go into full production by the end of the month. While the Web-services technologies in use--Simple Object Access Protocol and Web Services Description Language--are working well, RoTech is deploying one project at a time.

"We want to make sure we measure twice and cut once," RoTech CIO Albert Prast says. "All CIOs are a bit paranoid. We want to make sure the technology delivers and doesn't paint us into a corner."

RoTech uses billing data, such as patient name, address, telephone number, and physician, in conjunction with data from its custom-built customer-service application, which tracks and monitors patient use of RoTech equipment.

The Winter Park, Fla., company sells medical devices, such as oxygen concentrators, that require regular maintenance and contact with patients to make sure the equipment is used properly. Preferring open-source standards, RoTech runs its customer-service software on Red Hat Linux and uses an Apache Web server. The mainframe billing application uses an IBM VSAM file system on RS/6000 servers. The company has 200 servers that serve 650 U.S. locations.

With VelociGen tools, RoTech has wrapped the needed data in a Soap interface so it can be treated like an object in a distributed system. The data is delivered in XML format to the VelociGen server, which renders it in HTML for presentation to the customer-service reps' browsers.

The value of the tool is its ability to take the billing application written in the late 1980s and deliver it over the Web without requiring any changes to the older software. The cost of a new system would be prohibitive and unnecessary, because the old application scales, works well, and contains terabytes of information. "It's hard to justify by the return on investment on new technology," Prast says. "You'd be moving it for the sake of moving it."

Small vendors' tools tend to be platform-neutral, while major vendors favor the platform their products leverage. Microsoft depends on Windows, while BEA Systems, IBM, and Sun Microsystems are Java-centric. Customers often use the smaller vendors' tools to "wrap" methods, which is the processing that a component performs within an application, and expose them as objects that can be invoked using Soap. Developers find the tools useful because the new objects are reusable, reducing the time spent writing code.

Investment banker Robertson Stephens Inc. in San Francisco has used Cape Clear tools to wrap clusters of methods written in Java that run on BEA's WebLogic application server. Once wrapped in a Soap interface, the code can be invoked as an object for retrieving Robertson Stephens' financial research and displaying the information through a PDF viewer in a Web browser.

The WebLogic server processes the requests from behind the firewall. Outside the firewall, information requests from clients logging on to Robertson Stephens' site go through a Microsoft Internet Information Server. Having built the object in Cape Clear, Robertson Stephens' developers can invoke the research-retrieval component from any Soap-enabled application. "I see this as a way of putting common functionality in one place and sharing it," says Dirck Hecking, VP and acting technical architect for Robertson Stephens.

Before starting to work with Cape Clear in July, Hecking used open-source tools from the Apache Software Foundation but found he had to wait too long for patches that kept the tools up-to-date with the latest Soap specification. "I didn't want to spend all my time fighting the standard evolution," Hecking says. "I wanted to spend more time thinking about Web services and the best Web services for my firm." By choosing a vendor such as Cape Clear, Hecking was able to let the vendor worry about keeping the tools current with the latest standards.

The Web-services standards don't yet define security, operational management, workflow, business rules, transactional integrity, and other elements necessary for an enterprise-ready computing platform. Therefore, small vendors are providing some of those capabilities to entice customers.

A division of financial holding company Wachovia Corp., which completed a merger last month with First Union Corp., is depending on Grand Central Networks to provide security for its link with financial information provider Thomson Financial in Toronto.

Wachovia, in Charlotte, S.C., is working on a pilot project in which Soap is used to move information from Thomson to Wachovia's intranet, which sales reps and analysts use to access internal research data. Requests for Thomson data will go through a Grand Central hosted application that will handle security over secure HTTP and move Thomson data in XML format to Wachovia.

The data feed is expected to go live by the end of the month. Because the data isn't crucial for either company, the software needs to be only "as secure as any other Web-based application," says Tony D'Agostino, chief operating officer at Wachovia. "I'm not putting business-critical information on the Internet."

Nevertheless, the pilot is important to Thomson because it lets the company expose a data service through Soap, making it available to other companies looking to pay for research data delivered over the Internet. For Wachovia, the Web-services application gives it a cheaper alternative to using a dedicated line with proprietary software Thomson provides. "The idea here is for us to learn about Web services," D'Agostino says.

Independent software vendors also are using Web-services tools as an integration platform for connecting to third-party apps behind the firewall. Corybant Inc. plans to start selling in the first quarter of next year a workflow engine that leverages VelociGen's tools to expose a business process running on Corybant's Active Information Framework as a component through a Soap interface.

Corybant is targeting companies in which sales and service reps use wireless devices. For example, a sales rep could use a PDA to request that a nondisclosure agreement be sent to a potential customer via fax or E-mail. Corybant's workflow engine would process the request from behind the firewall, sending a copy of the nondisclosure agreement to the legal department and recording it in the company's customer-relationship management software. The VelociGen tool will ship to Corybant customers who do their own integration.

Security is a major concern among potential clients who often know little about Web-services technology. "One of the first things we have to educate folks about is that Web services doesn't mean that everyone on the Internet has access," says Wayne Sheppard, chief technology officer at Corybant. Without an assurance that Corybant's application runs behind the firewall, "it would be a very short conversation," he says. "They would think, 'This guy's an idiot.'"