A number of issues remain with regard to its widespread adoption, and they all revolve around the issue of trust and standards. If we delved into that murky world here, we'd not get out of this column until next Wednesday fortnight such is its complexity.
Suffice to say, the vendors all state publicly they are working together but actually, many are pushing hard for their own technologies to be adopted as standard in numerous forums such as the W3C and OASIS (Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards). Complicating the issue, as BEA's head of technology Michael Smith points out, is the propensity of some vendors, like Microsoft, to release a product and call it a standard in the hope everyone follows.
That doesn't fool most CIOs, though, and standards remain a hairpin bend on the road to adoption. The greatest fears, naturally, revolve around system security and identification of individuals or machines with which you want to communicate. Many other issues, such as what happens if a machine-to-machine conversation breaks down because of a network or Internet outage, also exist. Several vendors have banded together on numerous issues to publish joint policies. A security policy, for example, was published 12 months ago by IBM Microsoft, RSA Security and Verisign.
20,000 Leagues
For early adoption, it's a question of how deep do you dive. AAPT has linked up with one of the best-known purveyors of Web services, the American CRM outfit salesforce.com, which hosts applications. The telecommunications company made its decision while its CTO was apparently neck-deep in a multimillion-dollar proposal to improve systems the conventional way.
"I worked at Oracle for seven years and Accenture for three, and I can tell you their raison d'etre is to introduce complexity," says Doug Faber, the man on the ground for salesforce.com here. "Oracle tells you the Web services story, but it is actually there to sell databases and e-business suites. In the end, you just end up with a lot of raw fruit and vegetables being tossed."
Which bring us back to Ziggy Switkowski. If Web services, or any other Internet-based technology or strategy, is to be successful and globally competitive for Australian companies, then we need a national carrier that actually appreciates the importance of the very digital revolution it has helped create.
To use Ziggy's own words, it's mission-critical.
Mark Hollands is an independent IT consultant and journalist. He spent three years as a Gartner vice president, and was, in a previous incarnation, editor of The Australian weekly IT section
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