Microsoft: Upcoming Web Services Standards Will Boost Integration Opportunities

Microsoft

Sanjay Parthasarathy, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Platforms Strategy Group, said integration opportunities are available now and will grow with the emergence of new Web services standards for routing, messaging, transactions and business processes by the end of 2003.

The new Web services standards will complement an existing security standard, as well as XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. "Also around the corner are routing, transaction, messaging Web business-process standards," he said. "Over the next six to nine months, we will have all the Web service standards we need to do all integration."

Microsoft and Web services competitor IBM are collaborating on these new Web services standards, which will complement the Web services security standard recently unveiled by the two companies and VeriSign, Parthasrathy said.

"Customers tell us the No. 1 pain point is integration," said Parthasarathy during his keynote at Fusion 2002 Friday. "In the current economic climate, they worry about the productivity of the company and the flexibility to respond to competition and market changes. Web services is the best architecture to really deal with this problem of integration."

To make its case, Microsoft plans to trot out in the last quarter of 2002 a series of tools and benchmarks for partners that demonstrate the ROI of implementing Visual Studio.Net and XML Web services on existing infrastructures. The company also plans to release benchmarks that show vastly enhanced performance of .Net services over Java implementations.

Parthasarathy brought partners Ajilon and Perot Systems on stage to demonstrate that XML Web services can be deployed today to give corporations maximum return on investment for their employees, infrastructure, business processes and relationships with partners.

Ajilon Consulting, for example, said it built a .Net Web service code-named Viper for Verizon in New York after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. The solution took only days to build using Visual Studio.Net.

Perot Systems said it built a new .Net Web-based reporting solution for a major health care provider that offered 10 times of the performance of an existing Java implementation using one-third of the code.