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Web service will quietly transform the way you do business, whether you are ready or not. In this interview, Infrastructure Software director Sutor discusses how and when Web services will change the ways companies do their work.
   Mr Sutor, the thought of Web services seems to make a lot of managers anxious. Why is that?
   There is a lot of pressure and confusion about Web services. Many business people don’t really understand what they are, but they sense there is an IT revolution going on, and they are worried they’ll get left behind. Actually, we are in an evolution, not a revolution.
   If you think about the ways that business have connected their distinct software in the past — say, placing orders at one end and invoicing and shipping at the other — the problem has been that there have been so many different ways of doing it. A Web service application is simply a piece of software that sits between my partners and me and allows all these different systems to communicate more easily.
   What’s the real-world example of Web services changing the way a company does business?
   Berkins is a major shipping company. One of its units specializes in delivering high-value consumer goods from retailers to homes and goods, like large-screen TVs. To do this, Berkins uses a network of 16,000 agents, who own the trucks. It built a Web-services-based system that essentially created a kind of real marketplace in which agents could select jobs. When Berkins gets a shipping order, the company would pay via Web services simultaneously to all the agents signed for the system. The result has been increased efficiency, faster response time, less idle time for trucks and more satisfied retailers. The system is expected to increase shipping volumes and deliver increased revenue to Berkins by as much as $ 75 million annually.
   Many companies are developing Web services software — Microsoft, IBM, and the Sun, among others. If I’m a company considering using Web services, should I wait to see who will become the dominant player?
   I don’t believe there will be a dominant player in the long mn. Web services are like plumbing. Houses have standardized pipes; they are all designed to connect, and there are rules about how you connect them. Web services are like these standardized pipes. There isn’t one single pipe supplier — there are many, and their pipes are all compatible. However, the fixture — the software that Web services technology connects — is where the value is going to be.
   With so many quite different systems being connected through Web services, shouldn’t companies be concerned about security?
   Security is a major area of Web services development, and it needs a lot more complicated work than the security you use to send credit card data over the Web. For example, imagine I have a business that keeps all employees’ information in-house in an ERP system. My employees can sit down at our intranet system, enter their series numbers and passwords, and get full access to their job and salary data. Security is provided in some way so that only the appropriate people can view and update HR data.
   Are we past the point of early adoption?
   Web services are about three years old, so we are past the time when the earliest adopters decided to take a risk on an unproven technology. It’s not at all a wild frontier out there now. I’d say we are in the early mainstream period. There will be continued standardization of components that make up Web services, and that process should be complete around the end of 2005.