Cape Clear CEO Clarifies ESBs

Among the early evangelists of Web services, Cape Clear CEO Annrai O'Toole remains steadfastly committed to the software industry's new mode of application development. Most recently, Cape Clear rolled out a set of business process integration tools built on top of standard Web services interfaces. In industry parlance, such standards-based interface tools are now called enterprise service bus (ESB) products. In an interview with CRN Editor-in-Chief Michael Vizard, O'Toole discusses how ESBs are helping customers grasp what Web services can do.

CRN: Over the past few years, the move to Web services and service-oriented architectures has proved more evolutionary than revolutionary. What's your take on the status of the adoption of Web services?

O'TOOLE: When we all looked at this in 2001, we underestimated how quickly organizations could hook it all up. But it is definitely happening at a reasonable clip now. One of the key issues that had to be sorted out was putting together all of the product categories. Customers looking at all this stuff just saw standards and acronyms. And it's really the emergence of the concept of an enterprise service bus that has [generated] the momentum around Web services. People buy products, they don't buy concepts. All of that is being collapsed into the ESB.

CRN: What impact will enterprise service bus products have?

O'TOOLE: Many people view this whole ESB thing as just an evolution. They say we have Corba, and we have EAI and now we've got ESB -- so it's just a logical progression. I think that is a complete misunderstand of what's going on. I would argue that it's a revolution in terms of the impact this stuff will ultimately have on the software business. It changes everything. I don't think you can say the ESB is just a repackaging of old ideas. Now that all of the pieces have been built up over the last few years, you have all the transport and interoperability issues sorted out and all the transformation and routing capabilities built in. Plus -- with the emergence of reliable messaging stuff, better security and the Business Process Execution Language [BPEL] -- people really can assemble and pull things together. BPEL is a big catalyst for everything else that's going on. With BPEL, you get the ability to create long-running transactions, so you can assemble services to create a bigger services chunk to expose. That's where the action is now: aggregating Web services.

CRN: What does BPEL do?

O'TOOLE: BPEL gives you the language to express the business processes. That's never existed before. It's how an IT department will serve their business customers by giving them the ability to very quickly assemble new services in a business-oriented way, using visual diagrams that show the flows that need to happen for a business process to get executed. Our experience is customers are rushing very quickly into BPEL.

CRN: What role will Unified Modeling Language tools play in this?

O'TOOLE: We've always talked about the notion that people will start off with some UML models. UML came out of the software component [concept]. It came out of the idea that you've got small, discrete sets of software components that I can tie together. UML is great for that kind of thing. But Web services are things that a business person can understand, so it's nothing to do with software components. Our definition of a Web service is something you can show a business person.

CRN: What happens to all the vendors selling workflow and business process integrations tools today?

O'TOOLE: They either get on the BPEL boat or they get cannibalized. It's kind of one of those laws of nature. You can't have hundreds of tiny vendors all doing workflow in slightly different ways. We see a big shakeout coming.

CRN: What impact does all this have on the big packaged application vendors?

O'TOOLE: All those kinds of vendors have retained their franchise because they've had a walled-in garden. Web services are breaking down many of those walls. The ability to customize those business processes is not locked up inside the wall. I think customers are interested in BPEL because it gives them back a bit of agility. For a long time to come, we're still going to have those big walled gardens but they'll be wrapped up and insulated. More of the customization and things that people want to get done quickly will done outside the wall. It's not about building core technology or functionality, it's about the ability to customize very quickly.

CRN: Does BPEL mean we'll see the reemergence of business system analysts, except this time they will actually be able to execute a change rather than going to a developer to write the code?

O'TOOLE: The tools are much more amenable to business guys. Now I'm not saying that business guys are going to design BEPL properties from day one, but you can definitely see that we're going down that path. The business guy is going to say I want to put together a new product today. That will mean assembling these three things and changing the pricing and, boom, away we go.

CRN: So what should systems integrators take away from all this?

O'TOOLE: We're taking this next step. BPEL is coming in and you're looking at much richer functionality around an ESB. It isn't just about producing raw Web service APIs. It's about producing full-fledged services that the customer can plug in and orchestrate as part of an overall process. I think this radically does change software for a good number of years to come.