The Web Services imperative: Integration Infrastructure Software

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The Web Services

imperative: Integration

Infrastructure Software

An IDC White Paper

What is Web Services?

WS provides a way for applications and application components to interoperate regardless of the manner in which the different compo-nents have been implemented, including:

• The physical location of the component • The language in which it was written

• The execution environment within which it exists (operating sys-tem, application server or transaction monitor)

• The organization that owns it.

These features differentiate WS from other earlier initiatives aimed at interoperability because earlier initiatives all relied on the univer-sal adoption of a single technology model. If that were a realistic expectation, solutions to many problems would become much sim-pler.

We now recognize that there is never likely to be a single dominant technology - the constant evolution of ITmakes this entirely unrealis-tic. Progress means diversity, and we have to put in place an archi-tecture that will not just tolerate diversity, but thrive on it.

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Instead of technology dependence, WS relies on the adoption of a common set of standards by technology providers. The degree of cooperation between vendors (which at the implementation level continue to compete just as strongly as before) is unprecedented. Support for WS is now a requirement for all providers of software infrastructure and will soon be a prerequisite for application providers also.

How does Web services work?

WS provides interoperability between systems by raising the level of the interface beyond individual technologies to that of a document. Business processes within and between companies have always been driven by the exchange of documents designed to be under-stood and processed by humans. WS extends the concept of a doc-ument by using a technology-independent language (XML: eXtensible Markup Language) to define the document contents, and a standardized protocol (SOAP: Simple Object Access Protocol) for delivering these documents across networks.

Another important feature of Web services is that it provides a stan-dardized way of describing services (WSDL: Web Services Descrip-tion Language) so potential users can search for and dynamically access services. This lets organizations "expose" applications as services for use by other applications both within their business and inside other organizations.

In order to make this possible, businesses will register the services they are willing to expose in standardized directories. These directo-ries will be implemented at various levels - within organizations for the benefit of internal developers, within vertical industry groups for the support of cooperative activities within the industry, and globally to support common business and personal requirements. The speci-fication with the most traction in the area of standardizing these directories is UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integra-tion).

Business expectations of Web services

IDC expects the adoption of WS to be driven by the expectation of major benefits, some of which can be delivered now and some of which will become realistic as products and standards continue to evolve. Several benefits that are delivered as ITefficiencies are being delivered already.

The near-term focus for these benefits is on simpler application inte-gration and more productive application development. Of these, the requirement of simpler, more cost-effective, integration is more wide-ly recognized and is the product of the business requirement for consistency of information in a real-time business environment.

The near-term focus for these benefits is on simpler application integration and more productive application development.

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A closely related requirement is the need to integrate processes across organizational boundaries without the intervention of human operators. In the absence of Web services standards this has been an expensive and time-consuming activity, meaning that it could only be carried out cost-effectively for business partners where consider-able value or volume was being transacted. WS already simplifies this activity considerably, and further advances in standards and products are expected to be delivered within 2002. This will enable direct B2B partnerships with organizations of varied sizes and busi-ness volumes.

This cross-organizational cooperation gives the potential for provid-ing applications that use business functions from multiple companies to deliver a truly commanding application functionality, thus leading to new business opportunities and greater customer loyalty.

Other significant benefits include greater flexibility in using IThosting services to offload routine processing requirements while retaining direct control over "mission critical" business functions. WS will also provide a realistic platform for incorporating new mobile or small form-factor devices into the ITmainstream. Several other potential uses are more speculative at this time, and outside of the scope of this paper.

Overall WS provides the promise of reduced costs and increased adaptability of IT, and at the same time the creation of new business opportunities and the potential for entirely new business models to evolve.

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Exposing real-time information and interactive services via the Web is one of the hallmarks of "e-business", but our first few years of experience with this concept have shown that a simple Web re-fac-ing of applications does not always provide the type of user experi-ence that guarantees repeat business. Also, replacing systems that continue to fulfill a business need but are not Web-friendly is prohibi-tively expensive and time-consuming. Web services provides a means of constructing new applications with rich functionality based on existing application resources regardless of the properties of the applications - such as operating system, application server, develop-ment language, etc.

We can extend this idea by creating application components specifi-cally designed to be brought together by a Web services interface. A "component" is simply a part of a business process that does not have all the functionality of an application in its own right, but pro-vides a general piece of logic that can be used in many places. With Web services, new components can be made to interact with legacy applications, even if quite different technologies have been used to construct the two generations of software.

We can extend the idea a little further. Over the last several years has developed a substantial market for providing software

compo-Overall WS provides the promise of reduced costs and increased

adaptability of IT, and at the same time the creation of new business

opportunities and the potential for entirely new business models to evolve.

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nents that deliver a commonly required function over the Internet. The original model assumed that a developer would create a new application into which these new components would be assembled, thus saving a considerable amount of coding time. The developer could concentrate on writing the part of the application that is unique to the business without having to reinvent common services and functions. The problem is that this makes the assumption that the new application is to be written in a compatible language, locking the organization in to a particular technology. Because Web services makes no such assumption, it lets developers create a minimal amount of code to bring together off-the-shelf components and lega-cy applications in order to create a new, functionally rich, application without becoming locked in to any particular technology.

Taking this a little further still, within the Web services model there is no actual need for the components to be installed on the company's own computers, but could be accessed across the Internet as a sub-scription (or pay per use) service.

All of this is at relatively little additional cost. Once an application has been "Web services enabled" it becomes open for use in a vari-ety of new ways. Application development will benefit greatly from Web services both in terms of the productivity of developers and in terms of the richness of applications that can be constructed.

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The promise of Web services will not be realized without a robust integration infrastructure that manages and orchestrates the various Web services and legacy processes.

The infrastructure required to effectively deploy, integrate and man-age WS will grow as our expectations and usman-age patterns continue to evolve, but the fundamental requirements are well understood and relatively simple - at least in concept. Beyond the direct require-ments of the standards, however, WS requires a number of addition-al functions. As well as those that are used by developers in describing and finding services, a number of run-time services are needed:

• A service that monitors messages arriving at a network and identifies those that have a WS format

• A service that extracts the document payload from the WS mes-sage and sends it to the appropriate application

• A service that accepts documents returned by applications and encapsulates them in a WS-compliant wrapper before routing it back to the other party.

These three functions are typically bundled into a single service that sits between the applications and the outside world and are the most obvious part of the WS runtime requirements. There are, however, further requirements:

The promise of Web services will not be realized without a robust integration infrastructure that manages and orchestrates the various Web services and legacy processes.

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• A service to transform to XML document received through a WS message into the interface format expected by the application • A service that implements business rules to ensure that

mes-sages can initiate a coordinated sequence of business process-es instead of being limited to a simple knee-jerk reaction

• Management and monitoring services to ensure ITresources are being used effectively and efficiently, and to ensure that the busi-ness as a whole is aware of the work being processed through WS interactions and the total level of commitment this has gen-erated.

It can be seen that these features bear a strong resemblance to the features required of integration products, so we should now look at an example of this in practice.

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TIBCO is one of a small number of companies that has pioneered the ideas now expressed by Web services. Many of the infrastructure requirements have already become features of the TIBCO product set. Since 1996 TIBCO has proposed a "Services Oriented Architec-ture" that makes software functions available as services across a network, and has delivered integration solutions based on this con-cept. Because there were no standards for defining distributed com-ponents, TIBCO developed a proprietary approach to delivering this vision.

TIBCO has now added Web services support to its existing suite of integration solutions, leveraging the existing technology in support of new requirements. This framework provides the services required for enterprises to effectively deploy, integrate and manage Web services as productive and valuable parts of their business. These solutions include business process management, enterprise application inte-gration, B2B inteinte-gration, messaging, and portal.

TIBCO's current product set can be broken down into functional areas:

Process and Workflow Coordination

We can use the term "process engine" to describe the logical imple-mentation of rules for both Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Business Process Integration (BPI). While the nature of the rules vary in terms of complexity and the timescale over which a transac-tion or process can exist, both levels of integratransac-tion require the execu-tion of business rules that determine what acexecu-tions are to be initiated after a particular event occurs. The process engine therefore pro-vides the intelligence behind the integration (while the adapters are really enablement middleware).

Web services capabilities are implemented within the process engine by adding SOAP functionality that listens on the network for appropri-ate incoming messages, and packaging outgoing messages with a SOAP "wrapper" for onward delivery. This means the TIBCO

prod-TIBCO is one of a small number of companies that has pioneered the ideas now expressed by Web services.

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ucts can manage directly any service that has been exposed in con-formance with WS standards, regardless of the technology or devel-opment platform that has been used to achieve this. In this way new components built as Web services can be managed by TIBCO process engines with no further development, as could any applica-tion that has been WS enabled by other means including other inte-gration vendors.

Message Transport

In addition to the conventional WS transport protocol of HTTP/S, TIBCO also enables the transport of Web Services messages over JMS and its own TIBCO Rendezvous messaging software for inter-nal performance-critical use. The use of these alternate transports is transparent to external applications that wish to use its services. TIBCO also provides Adapters that connect the integration logic (whether EAI or BPI) with the individual applications and the platform on which they execute. Over the course of many implementations, TIBCO has gained considerable expertise in integrating COTS (Commercial Off-the-Shelf) applications, and provides off-the-shelf adapters for leading applications. TIBCO also provides a develop-ment kit that enables in-house developers and system integrators to create adapters for custom applications and COTS for which no pro-ductized adapter exists.

TIBCO's adapters and adapter development kit make available the option of exposing applications as Web services instead of the pro-prietary TIBCO protocol. These adapters could, in fact, be sold as standalone Web services enablement solutions. Alternatively, if an integration project is to be carried out to meet business information requirements, Web services enablement is delivered as an added bonus, effectively reducing the cost of future Web services projects.

Human Interface

The ability for people to directly interact with information and func-tions being delivered as Web Services will be important initially as businesses experiment with Web services and learn how to most effectively integrate them into their business. They will become even more critical as usage patterns evolve and Web services become ubiquitous parts of business processes.

TIBCO provides portal technology that is able to "consume" Web services and deliver them to people via personalized and cus-tomized interfaces including Web portals and wireless devices. This will gain in importance as 3G telephony services become widely available over the next few years. TIBCO's portal technology can also expose content and functions from non-Web services sources as Web Services in order to pass along or "syndicate" them to other applications and devices.

Metadata Management

Despite the standardization of the delivery mechanism for mes-sages, WS standards are a long way from providing a universally

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agreed format for the many types of messages that need to be exchanged between organizations. Many different industry groups have established message standards for their own industry, and some of these have been widely adopted, but there is no general cross-industry agreement. The OASIS standards body is working hard to secure the convergence over time of these standards, but this is recognized as being a long-term project.

Fortunately transformation between different styles of XML mes-sages is not difficult, provided that the metadata (the data describing the format of the messages) is known. TIBCO provides a Metadata Repository that allows for the storage and management of all the message XSDs (XML Schema Definitions) together with the rules for mapping between them. Such a capability will be important for any organization wishing to take part in B2B processing, but for organiza-tions such as industry trade portals this type of product will be vital. TIBCO Extensibility provides this framework for creating, converting and managing XML documents.

Monitoring and Management

TIBCO provides suitable management features with all of the func-tionality described. It is more important, though, to recognize that the flow of work through the organization, as represented by the pas-sage of Web services and other integration mespas-sages, contains a great deal of information about the business. What are the areas of activity, how long does each stage in a process take to complete, where are the bottlenecks in the system, what is the optimum capaci-ty at any point? Many questions similar to these can be answered by providing access to current and historical loads on the system, and TIBCO Hawk provides monitoring, management and visualization capabilities to extract further business benefit from this information.

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Web services is still very early in its adoption and maturity cycle, but it has shown already that it is capable of delivering real business benefit if applied to the right issues. Managing integration issues -both within and between organizations - tops the list of applications that can be addressed now.

Integration vendors are in the forefront of Web services adoption, and TIBCO has been a consistent market leader in the integration market. TIBCO has implemented Web services compliance through-out its product range in a timely manner, and this places the compa-ny in an extremely good position to exploit the anticipated growth of the WS market.

Beyond the immediate implementation of WS for integration purpos-es many other businpurpos-ess benefits are waiting to be exploited. Thpurpos-ese include both IT-efficiency focussed benefits and business-enable-ment benefits. All benefits are cumulative, and work carried out to deploy WS for any purpose is reusable, reducing the start-up costs of subsequent projects.

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Integration products have already evolved a very similar set of serv-ices to some of the fundamental requirements of a WS infrastruc-ture, and it is to be expected that technology with an integration origin will be at the heart of many WS implementations.

Web services will become a long-term component of our ITarchitec-ture, being specifically engineered to accommodate a wide variety of legacy technologies and, so far as is possible, compatible with any likely scenario for future technology developments. The timing is therefore right for organizations that have not yet developed a strat-egy for implementing WS to investigate their potential and create an implementation strategy.

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April 2002

IDC is the foremost global market intelligence and advisory firm helping clients gain insight into technology and ebusiness trends to develop sound business strategies. Using a combination of rigorous primary research, in-depth analysis, and client interaction, IDC forecasts worldwide markets and trends to deliver dependable service and client advice. More than 700 analysts in 43 countries provide global research with local content. IDC's customers comprise the world's leading IT suppliers, IT organizations, ebusiness companies and the financial community. Additional information can be found at www.idc.com.

IDC is a division of IDG, the world's leading IT media, research and exposition company.

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