Web services pioneer

AS A CTO for the consulting company Tybio, Joe Aloia has spent much of the last year helping deploy Web services technologies for the company's financial services customers. To help speed that effort, Tybio also developed its own set of deployment tools for Web services called Cydio. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Aloia talks about how Web services fundamentally changes the way IT departments will think about building and deploying applications.

InfoWorld: What's the driving force behind the adoption of Web services among your customers?

Aloia: Web services has been given a name -- a bad name, but a name just the same -- that has defined what people have wanted in software development for a very long time. They want to be able to componentize and reuse pieces of functionality, as well as being able to have communication between disparate system types.

InfoWorld: Right now, a lot of the work associated with Web services is still a very manual process. Will that change?

Aloia: We've been working on a product that basically fills that gap right now. It basically allows for an end-to-end or a soup-to-nuts-type solution that supports all the way from discovery through design through development and management and all the way through to deployment. The difference there is that our sites are not set for automatically having software have the intelligence for searching out things. I think that's the part that people really think is never going to happen. The automated nature of having a process search out other supporting functionality automatically and linking is not something that we're going to see in the very near future, if ever.

InfoWorld: Where have you seen the most adoption of Web services?

Aloia: It's always been our thought that the first level of acceptance was going to be on an intracorporate level. Companies are actually using this internally as an enhancement to their current development process, as opposed to going outside the company walls for b-to-b partnerships. I think it will have a place there, but right now, that to me is not where the first level of acceptance is going to come in because of all the ancillary issues, such as trusted partnerships and security.

InfoWorld: What is the bottom-line benefit that Web services will bring to those types of partnerships once it gets adopted?

Aloia: It will make the process of making trusted partnerships easier. The process of actually going out and establishing a trusted partnership and implementing against it is going to make that much easier.

InfoWorld: What impact will Web services have on system integrators who tend to specialize in enterprise application integration?

Aloia: This movement is going to take the specialty that was the integrators' bread and butter and turn it into something of a ubiquitous solution. A set number of these connectors or adapters are going to eventually be built, if they all have the ability to have a Web services interface where anyone can connect to anything else. So their model is going to have to change.

InfoWorld: What impact do you think Web services will have on developers?