Efficiency Is The Name Of The Game In Web Services

The company has launched an aggressive campaign in the past six months to align itself with Microsoft in promoting Web services to businesses in Southern California, said Joe Tang, president and CEO of the Marina Del Rey, Calif.-based solution provider.

"In the mid-1990s, everyone wanted a presence online," Tang said. "In the late '90s, they wanted e-commerce. Now it's all about collaboration, and collaboration brings efficiency."

Tang said efficiency is the primary motivation behind corporate America's adoption of Web services, which analysts define as Web-based applications that dynamically interact with each other using open standards such as UDDI, SOAP and XML.

"Many companies still have a lot of manual processes in place," he said. "A retail company working with product suppliers deals with lots of purchase orders and makes plenty of phone calls. Web services will allow these businesses to communicate seamlessly with their partners."

Guidance Solutions is focusing its Web services initiatives on companies with $100 million to $1 billion in revenue. Larger companies typically use EDI to manage value chains, and smaller players won't venture into the Web services arena as quickly as bigger businesses, Tang said.

The solution provider, whose customers include Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Foot Locker and Walt Disney, is using Web services to enable easy development and publishing of online content for a magazine publisher and to facilitate electronic order entry for a food-service distributor's customers.

The 2002 versions of Content Management Server, Commerce Server and BizTalk, the three .Net-enabled products comprising Microsoft's Web services arsenal, so impressed Guidance Solutions that the integrator is focusing exclusively on them to deploy Web services solutions.

"All these applications have been around in some form for about three years now, but the documentation was spotty, and the feature set wasn't as rich early on," Tang said. "It was the second releases that made us really believe in them."

But Microsoft doesn't stand alone in the Web services arena.

IBM is another powerhouse there, Sun Microsystems has thrown its hat in the ring, and a handful of lesser-known companies are putting in their two cents as well, said Daryl Plummer, group vice president of software infrastructure at research firm Gartner.

Sun has built a global consulting team focused on Web services within its professional services arm, said Dan Berg, director of Sun ONE consulting. "Web services are, by definition, based on industry standards, so we're adopting IBM and Microsoft standards and adding some of our own. But where we want to compete [with other vendors is on implementation."

Sun is also banking on solution provider partnerships to help it gain an edge in the Web services space, Berg said. "We pull our partners in on deals, and we expect them to do the same for us," he said. "We build the infrastructure, and we're the platform specialists, but we count on our partners to deploy the solutions. We're not business process re-engineering specialists, and we're not the ones with the vertical industry expertise."

Gartner's Plummer agrees that the Web services space opens doors for solution providers.

"For one, integrators can help customers begin implementing these services. Second, Web services require management. A solution provider can't just disappear once they've designed, developed and integrated a service like that. Who's going to make sure the service stays up and running? Who's going to maintain the quality of service?" Plummer said. "Most of all, we need systems integrators to address 'global-class computing.' With Web services, we're not talking just about applications within an enterprise. We're talking about applications across multiple enterprises and supply chains. Different companies have different security policies, different billing policies. We're talking about integrating entire value chains."