The Microsoft Factor

Rather than storm a modestly established software market with its marketing guns ablaze (think Web browsers), Microsoft already calls the new Web services market home; after all, it helped create it. That alone should be enough to make competitors squeamish, but it gets "worse". Microsoft's top executives (read: Gates and Ballmer) have placed its .NET platform, source of its XML Web services offering, at the center of the software giant's future plans. The twenty-year-old mantra "put a computer on every desk and in every home" that drove Windows has been replaced by .NET and "empower people through software any time, any place and on any device," according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Ballmer, who addressed attendees at last week's CeBIT conference, did not dismiss the importance of Windows and Office to Microsoft's future, but he added that ".NET is at the core of what we're trying to do as a company."

Darcy Burner, lead product manager of Microsoft's .NET platform strategy, explains it more explicitly, "All of our product development efforts are focused around moving the software we deliver to a connected model using XML Web services."

Microsoft has put significant advertising dollars where its new core is, too. To win customers and build its brand, Microsoft recently launched an advertising campaign on network television touting .NET. The "That's One Degree of Separation" commercials describe Web service applications, though they do not mention Web services explicitly.

Since announcing its .NET strategy more than a year ago, Microsoft has steadily rolled components to complete its offering, including the February 2002 unveiling of its successors to Visual Basic and Active Server Pages (ASP), respectively VB.NET and ASP.NET. Microsoft also has its own intermediary between programming languages called Common Language Runtime (CLR), which allows .NET applications to consist of more than one language, similar to the Java Virtual Machine of Sun's Java 2 Enterprise Edition platform.

As efforts to develop Web services intensify this year, look for substantial deployments from major and smaller vendors to surface. In a sign of things to come, Microsoft added Deutsche Telekom (DK) to its list of customers last week, perhaps, its most significant customer to date. DT agreed to adopt the .NET platform for its mobile and solutions business. DT will rely on .NET to launch new services later this spring that enable customers to access corporate data from a variety of devices and any location within the company's U.S. and European network. The deal calls for both companies to collaborate on creating a new XML Web services software portfolio called T.NET, which will operate within the European telecommunications giant's T-Systems technology unit.

Going head to head with Microsoft should have most small vendors quaking in their boots, but at least one vendor welcomes Microsoft's entry into the Web services market.

Microsoft's Presence is a Good Thing

Annrai O'Toole, CEO of Cape Clear, a small Web services software and integration provider, believes Microsoft's entry is a good thing.

But he welcomes Microsoft for more than just exposure. He sees the software giant's entry as a critical step to establishing a Web services marketplace.

"I think it is very similar to what they did with TCP/IP before Windows 95," O'Toole says.

Back in 1993-1994, connecting to a network gave people nightmares. It could take a week for a competent computer user to get TCP/IP to work on Windows. As O'Toole remembers, when someone bought the pieces of the TCP/IP stack, the first thing they had to do was "to take out the hardware care and start fiddling with it and put it back in.." Then Microsoft bundled the TCP/IP stack into Windows 95, and "changed the world," O'Toole says. O'Toole believes application integration bears a striking resemblance to life before Windows 95. The task of getting all the different information systems inside large organizations to talk to one another is extremely complex and costly. Companies spend millions of dollars to make it happen, something only the wealthiest organizations can afford.

"What Microsoft is doing by bundling all this Web services SOAP stack inside their operating system," O'Toole says, "is commoditizing integration and democratizing integration. They are saying: integration is going to become as commonplace as using a browser is."

The browser sounds like poor choice of words for a small vendor at play in the fields of software giants, particularly ones from Redmond, Washington, but O'Toole is not phased by the presence of Microsoft, IBM, HP, Oracle and Sun in this marketplace. He has at least one reason not to; these giants are, for lack of a better word, self-centered. By this, he means that when the dust clears these giants care more about their own platforms than how their platforms integrate with each other. For small, platform-independent integration vendors, this narcissism assures they will always have a place at the table.

So, Will the Software Industry's Sudden Détente Last?

The software industry's rally around open specifications and standards should not fool anyone. Microsoft, IBM, Sun, HP, Oracle, BEA and others are not really working together by choice; their enterprise customers demanded it.

"One of the things that I hear all the time from enterprise IT organizations," Brent Sleeper explains, "is how frustrated they are at how difficult it is to make their software work together."

That problem really permeates information technology at all levels. Web services potentially "brings us a step closer to solving that problem," Sleeper says, because a customer can be confident that the SOAP interfaces of Microsoft, IBM and BEA will work together.

As long as software companies don't go too far in seeking proprietary code or resisting widely accepted portions of the specifications within the Web services stack, Hecking and others believe Web services will work.

As Brent Sleeper says, "the reality is a little fuzzy. Microsoft and IBM shaking hands over this is a great start, but it isn't the solution yet. In other words, we are getting there, the process is underway, but there is a lot of work to be done."

Why Large Enterprises Love XML?

The story of Web services really starts with extensible markup language (XML), which the W3C or World Wide Web Consortium (not WWF, worldwide wrestling federation) released as a standard in October 1998. XML bridged the gap between HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the Web's set of inflexible document tags, and SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), the complex, vendor-independent system for structuring large data repositories. XML trimmed down the scope of SGML to a narrow definition that maintained the definable nature of SGML while mirroring the simplicity of HTML. Whereas HTML offered a set of tags everyone adheres to, XML lets the user define the tags that structure a document. Because it's a version of SGML, XML allows companies warehousing vast stores of data in SGML repositories to bring their content to the Web by porting it into XML. Meanwhile XML also lets companies define the characteristics of their documents, something HTML does not do. In a nutshell, HTML is fixed; SGML is clunky; XML is fast and flexible.

The establishment of the XML standard opened the door for a lot of new ideas. No predefined tags means no preconceived semantics. Therefore, an enterprise could bring their content to the Web and present it the way they wanted to.

What Standards are Web Services Built On?

The standards at Web services' core are:
The Common Internet Protocols - TCP/IP, the backbone of networking, and http, the connection protocol used by web servers and browsers belongs here.

XML - XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. XML is the format that defines the contents Web services deliver. See other sidebar for further details.

SOAP - SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol. Microsoft defined the first SOAP specification (SOAP 1.0, but it was decidedly Microsoft-centric. So Userland Software, IBM and DevelopMentor stepped in to make it more open. Together they created SOAP 1.1. " If you wanted to ask yourself what created Web services, what was the moment that it started," James Governor says, "it was the publication of the SOAP 1.1 specification."

The emerging new layers to this core are:
WSDL - WSDL stands for Web Services Description Language. It does exactly what it says it does. WSDL is the XML format used to describe a Web service and how it can be used. Think of it as a mini-instruction manual that lays down the foundation for the Web services transaction, including security detailing.

UDDI - UDDI stands for Universal Discovery Description and Integration. In 2000, Ariba, IBM and Microsoft teamed to create the spec; they released it in May 2001. UDDI is structured like the Domain Name Service (DNS), which is a publicly distributed database for reconciling Internet addresses to host names. UDDI is, perhaps, best described as the "Yellow Pages" for Web services. It promises a directory of available Web services for businesses and possibly even consumers. Perhaps a decade from now, businesses will check a main UDDI or subdirectory for a Web service to fulfill a pressing business need. According to James Governor, Three public registeries are operational. HP, IBM and Microsoft each run one of these registries. SAP plans to host a fourth registry.

Other specifications being developed, proposed or pushed are:
WSFL - WSFL stands for Web Services Flow Language. One of the newest additions to the Web services stack, WSFL is an attempt to help web services implementers express the business logic needed to make multiple services work.

ebXML - The eb stands for Electronic Business and efforts to establish a standard XML format for exchanging ecommerce-related information. It got its start before Web services and is sometimes viewed as a competitor to Web services, though its focus is reportedly on advancing the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) format for transmitting business documents or forms between trading partners.
Developed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), ebXML is now the province of ebXML.org, a joint initiative of OASIS and the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT). UN/CEFACT adopted ebXML as a standard in May 2001. It recently added SOAP support.

XAML - XAML stands for Transactional Authority Markup Language. XAML will attempt to define a group of XML interfaces that allow Web service providers to conduct business transactions spanning the Web services of multiple parties. Bowstreet, HP, IBM, Oracle and Sun launched this initiative at Internet World on October 25.