IBM, Microsoft Team Up With BEA On New Web Services Specs

IBM Microsoft BEA Systems Sun Microsystems

On Friday the three companies unveiled that they have published specifications to define, create and combine business processes, as well as organize those processes within and across enterprises, in a Web services environment, company executives said.

One of the new technologies combines specifications IBM and Microsoft already had developed, IBM WSFL and Microsoft XLANG, into a new, executable language for business processes, Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL).

The other new specs are Web Services Coordination (WS-Coordination) and Web Services Transaction (WS-Transaction), which together organize and manage transactional-based processes across different company networks, said Dave Wascha, lead product manager for .Net enterprise servers, Microsoft.

John Kiger, director of Web services marketing for BEA, said the three technologies collectively "provide a standard way for companies to specify how a collection of Web services work together to accomplish a complex business processes."

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IBM and Microsoft have collaborated as lead companies on several key Web services specs, including UDDI and WS-Security. They also were the catalysts for the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), the group working to ensure Web services work with various vendors' technology. BEA also is a WS-I member.

Sun, however, still has not joined WS-I amid controversy that IBM and Microsoft purposefully kept Sun from taking a leadership role in the group, as previously reported in CRN.

A spokesman for Sun said Friday that Sun did not know about the work surrounding the new specs. He added that Sun would take a look at them and support them if they will be "royalty-free" and eventually submitted to a standards body.

Karla Norsworthy, director of dynamic e-business technologies at IBM, said the new Web services specs likely will follow the same route of other Web services technologies IBM and Microsoft has developed. She said once the industry has a chance to review them and contribute feedback, WS-Coordination, WS-Transaction and BPEL likely will be submitted a standards organization.