Systinet CEO sees three phases for Web services
Exec also stresses independence for company
Follow @pjkrillThomas Erickson recently took over as president and CEO of Systinet, one of a growing number of companies focused on the Web services and SOA (service-oriented architecture) management spaces.
Prior to joining Systinet, Erickson served as an executive vice president at webMethods and also held executive positions at Baan, Filenet/Watermark Software, and MRO Software. Among Systinet’s products is Systinet Registry, a UDDI-compliant registry for SOAs. Earlier this month, Erickson met with InfoWorld's Editor in Chief Steve Fox, Test Center Executive Editor Doug Dineley, Executive Editor at Large Eric Knorr, and Editor at Large Paul Krill to discuss his views on the phases of Web services, Web services standardization, and alliances with other vendors.
InfoWorld: Can you talk about your view on Web services?
Erickson: We’re looking at the Web services world or SOA world as a three-phase evolution. And [what] we’ve seen in the first phase involved people [who] rather than building this API and RPCs with some proprietary protocol, build it using Web services.
The second phase is what we call the business services phase, so moving from a Web service to a business service. And the difference here is that people now are starting to say, well, rather than just build these interfaces onto existing applications, we’re actually going to design something from the ground up with a notion of reuse, with a notion of providing some real value.
And the best example is one of our customers, and unfortunately, some of our customers don’t allow us to share their names. One of our customers is a financial services organization, just say one of the Big Five globally. And they have a compliance requirement where to prevent money laundering they want to do compliance management of wire transfers, and they operate in 120 countries around the world. But they want everybody to use the same service for obvious reasons. And compliance, of course, is a big issue across all kinds of corporations these days. And the enterprise architects in these companies [are] starting to realize [that] creating a business service where compliance might be a compelling need seems to make sense.
Web services management … is what we call the third phase, and that still needs some more standards to get into play. I mean that needs things like WS-Addressing. So the first phase has just really done Web services and then created some business services. But what they haven’t done is helped us with what an SOA’s supposed to really be about, which is interoperability between these endpoints or applications, if you want to call them that, to the extent that not everything has to be known by the person building the endpoint at the time they build it.
InfoWorld: Do you think there are too many standards efforts going on in Web services?
Erickson: Well, good question, and it’s certainly confusing, and it’s confusing for us as a company trying to keep up with all of them. Are there too many? I’m a perpetual believer that dialogue is good, but I do believe that some standards will survive and others won’t. I do believe you need to have dialogues between parties to create some kind of interoperability capability.
