Team Effort Key To Web Services Standards Push

The chances got better late last month when Sun Microsystems decided to join the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) organization as a contributing member. It was a big about-face that came just days after the group said it would add two more seats to its existing nine-member board.

Sun's move paves the way for the company to win a board seat of its own next spring when the two new seats are filled. Any company wanting to vie for a seat must have been a WS-I member in good standing for at least 90 days, according to a WS-I spokeswoman.

The WS-I, which pledges to ensure interoperability between services built on different technologies, was launched amid a sea of controversy last February. Its founding members included IBM and Microsoft but not Sun.

While IBM and Microsoft executives maintained that Sun had been invited to participate, Sun cried foul, saying no invitation had been offered. The ill feelings worsened in May when an e-mail introduced in the Microsoft antitrust trial showed that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates indicated that he would approve Microsoft's participation in WS-I only if Sun wasn't involved in the launch.

"This was a case of Microsoft and IBM trying to get together and vote us off the [Web services island," said one Sun insider earlier this year.

After the WS-I announced the board expansion, a Sun spokesman was cautiously optimistic. "We'll take another look at the organization. But remember, this is the same organization [about which Bill Gates was quoted as saying, 'This is cool as long Sun is not a member,' so pardon our hesitation," he said.

Within days, Sun said it was in. "Sun's issue really has never been related to whether WS-I is doing the right thing," said Ed Julson, group marketing manager for Web services standards and technologies at Sun. "Our problem has fundamentally been that we've not been able to join at the level we thought was appropriate. Now that the WS-I has ratified the motion to add two seats to the board, they've opened the door."

Integrators following the WS-I debacle said self-interest will motivate the key vendors to overcome parochial concerns and work things out, as the promise of Web services is void if a service built with one company's technology can't work with a service based on another's platform.

"The thing with standards groups is, you have to have all the players aboard. Once there's one crack, other cracks open up," said Andy Sweet, CTO of Perficient, an Austin, Texas-based IBM partner. "This is a high-stakes game. People separate momentarily, but in the end the importance of this will pull people together for the foreseeable future."

Julson said Sun plans to run for a board seat. The nomination process takes place from Jan. 1 to Feb. 15, with elections taking place in March. The new board members are slated to take their seats in April.

The recent increase of Web services standards in the industry is confusing the issue, Julson said. Sun is looking forward to helping stymie that confusion, he said.

"There is a great deal of concern around complexity and overlapping functionality around these standards, and developers are unsure what to do," Julson said. "We think it's really important for Sun, Microsoft, IBM and others to sit down and start the work to simplify this standards effort."

Julson said Sun is joining the group "in good faith," despite the continuing tension between Sun and Microsoft.

"I think that many customers out there have had enough of the bickering," Julson said. "We have to learn to get along with Microsoft, and they have to learn to get along with us. We just have to make it happen. We're not always going to agree, [but that's not the objective. We can certainly be civil."

The WS-I currently has more than 150 member companies, including industry heavyweights BEA Systems, Oracle, Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard and Intel.