Making the Connection

These are salad days for Web services (and apparently the Internet, according to Telstra's CEO).

It is hard to imagine he could say it with a straight face. Yet the edifice of Ziggy Switkowski did not show the slightest inclination to crack. "We realise that in 2003 the Internet is now mission-critical for our customers." Ziggy, the telecommunications-meister of Australia, the man who heads this nation's largest technology company, said it with neither a hint of sarcasm nor in an attempt at understated humour.

He just said it and expected everyone to take him seriously. That, unfortunately, was the joke.

"Whether they're residential customers using the Net socially for e-mail correspondence, or whether they are corporate customers using the Net to undertake commerce, it needs to be operated at kind of industrial strength."

Kind of industrial strength? Oh, you've got us rolling in the aisles with that one. Where do you get them, Ziggy?

A severe case of Rugby World Cup fever would be the only excuse for an Australian being unaware of Telstra's shocking few weeks of service with BigPond. Reportedly hit by the Swen virus, the broadband provider seemed to lurch from trouble to disaster. Bad days turned into woeful weeks. It was a worst nightmare of any C-level executive, as well as those on the help desk caught in the crossfire of failing technology and angry customers.

Perhaps you could dismiss BigPond's troubles as a minor episode in a much bigger story of Internet adoption and reliance; or charitably say Telstra has become a quality company in the past decade and, regrettably, these kinds of things happen from time to time. After all, Internet technology is not perfect. Only a fool would claim it was designed to be 100 per cent reliable, and Telstra was not the only company blighted by troubles.

What is harder to swallow, however, is that it has taken the chief executive until now to appreciate that millions of us - including Telstra - rely on the Internet for commercial survival. Surely, Mr Switkowski need only read the monthly reports of his own CIO, Jeff Smith, to appreciate that. (In all likelihood, they are sent dutifully by e-mail, too.) One of the topics covered would be Telstra's strategic development of Web services - a business technology discipline that Australian companies are experimenting with increasingly. Its ultimate goal of allowing computers and their software to communicate regardless of colour, creed, politics or geography, is dependent on the same Internet that has blind-sided Mr Switkowski.

Telstra has become a local champion of Web services, understanding the benefits of efficiency (and revenue generation) that can come from allowing internal and external computer systems to hook into each other in a way never achieved before.

Page Break

Too Bad About the Name

One of the great shames of Web services is its moniker. It's a dumb name for which we can thank some boffin in engineering at Microsoft. It fails at every level to describe itself adequately, and yet it appears we are now saddled with it. To make matters worse, the technologies required for it to work are a hodgepodge of unattractive four-letter acronyms, such as SOAP and UDDI. It just isn't a concept that lends itself to anyone but a hard-nosed technologist, yet the business benefits can be substantial.

In organisations large enough to support a CIO and a dedicated IT staff, a Web services project will most likely be under way. It may be only a skunkworks, or perhaps a small-scale experiment aimed at providing a demonstrable benefit to a unit within an enterprise.

The debate about whether Web services will take off finished two years ago. As a legitimate technology strategy, it has definitely left the tarmac. Now, it is just a question of how it will fly and the time it will take to become a ubiquitous communications media between computer systems and the occasional human. It has the basic platform to be successful: A mass of vendors supporting the technology, a number of high-profile adopters, such as Google and Amazon.com, plus analyst ratification that this is not another industry mirage.

The pitch for Web services is simple; that it is simply an evolution of technology not a revolution. The analysts at Gartner are particularly keen on parroting this phrase, and executives from vendors such as IBM and BEA are happy to re-quote Gartner's carefully crafted statement.

But it is a strategically delivered understatement.

The analysts and vendors know you won't buy into another revolution, not after Y2K and that whole dotcom catastrophe. No one but Dubya is into revolutions nowadays. Yet, if you stack up the analyst numbers in terms of what Web services technologies can provide in terms of efficiencies, especially when it comes to driving down software development costs, then this appears to be a startling advancement. Five years ago, they'd have been talking revolution.

Time Is Money

Stephen Mills, who works on IBM's Websphere team, says that in a Web services environment only a third of the code is needed for an application development project because of the commonality of other code to ensure interoperability. And the time to deploy should be reduced by 20 per cent, too. Figures from analyst IDC support that view, even claiming that a heterogeneous Web services world would make programmers almost twice as productive.

A logical conclusion from all this might be your commitment to code-cutting staff would reduce, they would not need to be so skilled and, therefore, could not demand the current level of wages.

"The budget to integrate applications is one of the largest buckets of IT money as organisations strive to achieve a single view of the customer," says Mills. "Web services creates an environment where software packages such as Siebel and SAP can talk to each other through a set of common protocols. In the past, you would have had to develop a $500,000 'hub and spoke' architecture for the same outcome."

Protocols are built into applications now to make it all happen, he says. "It is simply another blade on your Swiss Army knife."

At a most basic level, we will begin to slowly see Web services pull down the walls of proprietary systems in the back office. The key platforms to achieve this will be Microsoft's .Net and J2EE. The software protocols fuelling the flames are WSDL, which is the interface, while Microsoft's SOAP acts as the messaging protocol and XML is used at the common language, a digital Esperanto. The other common acronym is UDDI, which is a directory to find companies with Web services, but up to this point it is little used.

Page Break

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