What I am seeing, however, is the adoption of Web services and SOAs by particular industries. By that I mean financial services
industries and sub-industries such as banking and insurance, but also government, health. But they all have to start standardizing
the descriptions of the Web services they expect their companies to use. If you have lots of one-off services you will never
get to a full efficient SOA. This is the standardization of how you talk to services and how they talk back to you. Some of
this work has started because, after all, XML is five years old. People have started to understand how to represent their
information as XML. But they also have to take the additional step of saying, look we are not just pushing information around
-- in particular industries you have business processes. So what we are really talking about here is using SOAs to implement
business processes, and that is what you standardize.
InfoWorld: From a technical standpoint what direction is IBM going in with its server-based applications, such as WebSphere,
to prepare for SOAs?
Sutor: We are adopting principles such as model-driven development from Rational Software. We are also adopting the view of
services in the way we think about how we develop WebSphere itself, and how we do systems management and Tivoli too. Looking
at what we will have during the second half of next year we have this project called Vela. Vela is really what we consider
to be the next generation of application servers and, in our particular case, it will serve as the universal foundation for
software group products.
InfoWorld: How will Vela change your approach to developing other server-based applications?
Sutor: In terms of our software portfolio, we need to componentize them so that we can mix and match pieces from Tivoli,
some from Lotus, and some from WebSphere. By doing so you not only get the core functionality but you can extend it as necessary.
It means that we will be able to create software offerings that more closely match the immediate needs of our customers, particularly
those in vertical industries. It also means we can more flexibly deal with things like system messaging and enterprise-quality
service. In the Vela timeframe, we are going to be driving things like new look and feel around usability and much more support
for the business cases involving the use of these different technologies. But more than just componentization, [Vela] is providing
a foundation for an On Demand operating environment. It will fit in with what we are doing with grid, autonomic computing,
and it will be extremely obvious at that time as to how it will all fit into SOAs and what we can deliver.
InfoWorld: The idea of componentizing software never seems to reach full fruition. Why will it be any different this time?
Sutor: That brings us right back to SOAs. I think a lot of the reasons why componentization did not work in the past were
that the pieces were not loosely coupled enough. There were too many dependencies among the pieces either in terms of understanding
how you talk to them but also the way you connected them. But with XML and the Internet we no longer have to deal with proprietary
data formats, and assuming there is some standardization of what the data actually is that we send back and forth, we can
establish standardized security. Not just that but Web services security with federation, which means if you have one type
of security system inside your company and I have another one, then we are able to actually bridge those two.
InfoWorld: How do EnterpriseService Buses (ESBs) factor into your thinking with SOAs and Web services?
Sutor: I think the notion of ESBs has been inflated somewhat. For many people it was just a new acronym and so it became popular.
InfoWorld: What role does it play in tying together heterogeneous environments?
Sutor: Well if that is what you want to do, you can do that today. A full ESB means you have to connect applications that
are running on different kinds of platforms, everything from Cobol apps to Java apps. You have to push data around with guaranteed
quality of service. You also need to be able to do data transport and, if necessary, be able to push this data down to wireless
devices. You can do a lot of these things right now with WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker.
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