Start Small With Web Services

And it will take a new breed of programmers and systems integrators to help make this happen, they said.

The reality is that full-blown Web services standards will take two to five years to develop because of the evolving standards environment, said Steve Benfield, CTO at Novell eXtend, formerly SilverStream. That means enterprises should be testing proof of concept projects and looking for ways to make their data XML-ready rather than trying to dive headfirst into Web services, he said.

Brian Reed, vice president of market strategy for DataDirect Technologies, a components vendor based in Rockville, Md., said many companies view early Web services work as a means of testing development methodologies and assessing what sorts of knowledge and programming skills are needed in the future, he said.

The reality is that few companies today are prepared to embrace Web services across their entire organization - something that is tied as much to unsolved business process issues as technical gaps, said Bob Zurek, vice president of advanced technologies for Ascential Software, a data integration tools developer in Westboro, Mass. "This is about tackling real-world problems and not sitting back in the IT lab and conducting experiments," said Zurek.

Initially, Web services and business process integration will be the realm of existing experts in business integration and in creating applications that are interface-agnostic, said Reed. As Web services become more mainstream, however, more companies will be willing to outsource this work, he said.

The first focus of many of these projects will be on portals and other ways to syndicate content and use corporate information assets more wisely, rather than on transaction-based applications, said several of the speakers.

Meanwhile, the panelists advised integrators and software developers to watch out for pitfalls associated with XML that could discourage early Web services adopters. These include undefined security practices and transaction methodologies, poor architecture planning and performance issues associated with using XML to tag data.

Above all, developers should keep things as simple as possible at this stage of the game, in order to win over Web services converts. "Many companies today are lucky to get a bill out on time, with the right numbers," said Bill Whyman, president of The Precursor Group, an research firm in Washington.