WS-I Readies Guidelines; VARs Say It's Too Soon

But solution providers say it will be a long time before customers adopt Web services and use the standard practices that the WS-I group is promoting for interoperability.

Norbert Mikula, vice chairman of the WS-I organization and director of Web services technology at Intel, said the group will have three offerings by the end of the year to help companies implement practices to make Web services work across disparate technologies.

Those deliverables are WSBasic 1.0, a basic profile of guidelines for Web services interoperability; sample applications in a variety of areas, including supply chain management and e-business, that show how Web services work together; and testing tools so companies can see if their Web services will operate across technologies from competing vendors.

Solution providers say that while the WS-I group's work is certainly valid, it won't come into serious play for quite a while given current market conditions.

"[Their mission is way ahead of the adoption of Web services by different enterprises, especially in [the B2B [space," said Sreedhar Kajeepeta, vice president of e-business practice at Covansys, a systems integrator based in Farmington Hills, Mich.

While solution providers are building some Web services to connect companies with trusted business partners, there is little of the widespread Web services adoption that the interoperability group's work would enable, Kajeepeta said.

Rob Mock, founder and president of Dewpoint, a solution provider based in Detroit, said his customers are more "concerned with scalability, integration with existing environments and short-term ROI" than they are with baking Web services standards into systems.

"When they can see [short-term ROI, they're spending money, and when they can't see it, they're deferring decisions [on IT spending," Mock said.

Once released, the WS-I group's offerings will be available free to all members, who pay $3,000 a year for membership. Non-members can access the group's materials by signing up as technology "adopters," Mikula said.

The WS-I group was formed in February by several IT vendors, and its board includes a who's who of high-tech companies including Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Fujitsu, SAP, BEA Systems and Accenture.

At its founding, the group received scrutiny from industry observers because Sun Microsystems was not among its founding members.

Mikula said Sun was invited to join the group, but not as a founding, or board, member.

Sun executives said the vendor has no plans to join unless it can be a board member.

Early this summer, however, IBM proposed that the group's board expand its membership. If the motion is passed, the board will include two more members, Mikula said. But for that to happen, a working group must craft necessary bylaw changes, he said. Then the current board members and the group as a whole must approve those changes.

Once that happens, Mikula said he expects the WS-I group to hold elections for two new board members in the first quarter of 2003. But this doesn't mean that Sun necessarily will be able to join the board; on the contrary, only WS-I group members can vie for a board seat, and Sun is currently not a member.