The
purpose of this paper is to describe webMethods’ position on web services.
webMethods defines the term “web services” to be software application modules
that can be executed across the Internet and have well-defined technical input and
output interfaces. The technical interfaces allow the web services to be easily
incorporated into locally executing applications. Web services will enable
developers to develop highly complex, sophisticated and yet compact
applications with minimal coding by leveraging application modules running and
executing on remote hosts across the Internet.
Web
service technology is the enabler for a new class of web service providers
(WSPs) to provide business services that can be located in standard service registries
and directly integrated into customers’ business process flows. The benefits to
both the WSPs and customers are enormous, ranging from potential labor savings,
data error elimination, response time reduction, to resource utilization
efficiency increases (the reason why customers go to WSPs in the first place).
A
complete web service architecture can greatly reduce the cost of integrating
services into customers’ business processes and therefore make the services
more appealing to customers and shorten the time between when the customer
signs up the service and when they start to consume the service (the point of
revenue generation for the WSP).
A
complete web service architecture can also have significant cost impacts on
managing the activities, service levels, billings and customer care of the
connections between the WSP and its customers. A well-planned web service
architecture is needed to address these management issues in a robust manner
and deliver lower overall system management costs to the WSP.
Web
services represent real market opportunities for service providers, service
consumers and infrastructure providers. webMethods believes that properly
architected and implemented web services will add significant values to
e-Commerce value chains and bring business integration to a whole new level. As
a B2B infrastructure provider, webMethods is committed in making web services a
successful business and technology paradigm, and is actively working on
bringing web services from concept to reality.
B2B
integration to date has focused largely on connecting existing trading partners
in a private trading hubs or connecting suppliers and buyers to a public
marketplace. Integrations between trading partners and trading hubs (private or
public) tend to be custom built for each trading hub. For example, if a
supplier participates in three different trading hubs, the supplier will most
likely have to deal with three different B2B interfaces using different messaging
protocols, a significant amount of extra work for the supplier. Furthermore,
there is no easy way for the supplier to advertise itself to potential buyers
because of the lack of a standard service registry infrastructure. The lack of
standard discovery and interfacing mechanisms prevents more widely adoption of
B2B integration.
webMethods
believes that standardized web service architecture and the associated standard
support infrastructure will greatly accelerate the adoption of B2B integration by
significantly reducing the cost for service providers (suppliers) to bring
their service online (in machine integratable form) and greatly increasing the
visibility of available service providers to potential customers. This will be
accomplished through the use of standards such as SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL. These
standards not only reduce the cost of service discovery, implementation, and
binding, they also make possible seamless communications among heterogeneous
B2B platforms, e.g., a customer running BizTalk Server can consume services
delivered by webMethods B2B Server.
Industry
supported B2B integration standards will take us a major step closer to the
world of plug-and-play integration of business services from our suppliers.
With seamless electronic exchange of information, WSP can provide personalized
web services to service consumers at highly competitive prices, and service
consumers can created highly tailored services for themselves by combining
different web service offerings in a cost-effective way. When web service
consumers start to realize real productivity gain and cost savings by
outsourcing most of their non-core business functions to WSPs, the B2B
integration has reached a whole new level.
webMethods’
Corporate Web Service Initiative
webMethods
is keenly aware of the implication of web services in the future. As a result,
webMethods has embarked on a corporate initiative to position itself firmly for
the new world of web services. webMethods is the leading B2B integration
infrastructure vendor. The original goal of webMethods is help companies
exposing their business functions as B2B services on the Web. As a practitioner
of B2B integration, webMethods has accumulated an enormous amount of field
experience in connecting business together electronically in the past several
years. Consequently webMethods has built out a highly robust B2B infrastructure
for managing business communications, a foundation for developing and deploying
reliable and high-value web services.
webMethods’
web service initiative is composed of three major components:
webMethods
is in process of launching a web service marketing program aimed to promote the
use of web services to the webMethods user community and to build up a vibrant
premium web service provider community for both webMethods and non-webMethods
users.
In
the technology front, webMethods B2B Server and Trading Networks products have
proven to be a solid platform for developing, deploy, integrate, and manage B2B
integration. webMethods have helped its customers realize significant cost
savings and new revenue streams through B2B integration. webMethods is
enhancing the product to support UDDI, WSDL and SOAP-RPC for cross-platform web
service development, deployment, and management.
Based
on actual B2B implementation experience, webMethods realizes that there will
still be a significant amount of last-mile integration work for high-value,
transaction based web services, both at customer and WSP sides even with the
existence of a standardized web service discovery and integration
infrastructure. webMethods is putting in place a set of automated services that
are designed to assist WSPs in delivering last-mile integration knowledge to
their customers. A separate infrastructure is being put in place to assist WSPs
in developing their web service offerings.