SANTA CLARA, CALIF. -- With the morass of industry bickering and competition over industry standards, users might want to consider blackmailing vendors by closing their wallets, an analyst said here Friday at the InfoWorld Next-Generation Web Services II: The Applications conference.

   ADVERTISEMENT
  

Free IT resource

Virtualization Insights from Top Experts - Learn how virtualization gets real!

Sponsored by Dell

Free IT resource

TechNet: More ways to know it, share it, and keep it running.

Sponsored by Microsoft

RELATED LINKS
»  AT&T buys high-speed wireless spectrum for $2.5 billion
»  Update: Sprint chief Forsee resigns
»  IT trainer offers master's degree for hackers
»  Wireless RSS feed 

IDG ENTERPRISE NETWORK
• More Network LAN/WAN News...  (ComputerWorld)
• Wireless EV-DO on board  (ComputerWorld)

TOP NEWS 


IT SOLUTION SEARCH

Vendors both compete and cooperate when it suits their needs, according to consultant Amy Wohl, president of Wohl Associates, of Narberth, Pa. Web services have become mired in competing standards efforts and vendors breaking off into separate alliances, she said. But users need standards, Wohl stressed.

"We need to do whatever we have to do to make the vendors behave like good industry citizens. I suggest the use of blackmail myself," Wohl said.

Users need to make reasonable demands on vendors and back them up by voting with buying dollars to prod vendors along, said Wohl.

"The real goal of standards is to ensure that we can interoperate," she said.

Wohl compared vendor bickering over Web services standards to the Unix wars of several years ago, which saw multiple, competing variants of the Unix operating system on the market. That battle, Wohl noted, "did not have a good outcome. We ended up in the end being not the mainstream operating system."

We're dealing with way too many standards" for Web services, said Wohl.

"One of the problems is going to be figuring out how to cluster them into groups," she added.

Vendors have been proposing dueling standards such as Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS), from IBM, Microsoft, and BEA, and Web Services Choreography Interface (WSCI), led by Sun but also with participation from BEA, for handling Web services in business-to-business transaction-type environments.

Wohl noted there are multiple Web standards organizations, such as Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), World W3C, and Liberty Alliance. She added there are good points and bad points about standards. The good is that they provide interoperability and choice within the standard, enable avoidance of vendor lock-in, and can lower costs. But they also can limit choice or provide too many choices and many have to choose with limited information.

She criticized a Microsoft presentation given Friday by Dan'l Lewin, Microsoft corporate vice president for .Net, in which Lewin called Sun's Java language proprietary. "I don't think it's any less or any more proprietary than what Microsoft does," Wohl said.

Wohl also said she expects Sun may soon join the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), which has been an IBM- and Microsoft-led initiative.