Mark Johnson
Large businesses clearly recognize the Internet's enormous
opportunities for business efficiency, seeing an inexpensive,
ubiquitous infrastructure for integrating with both their own internal
business units and trading partners. Small businesses see the Internet
as an effective communication tool that they can use to compete with
the Big Guys. So far though, no obvious winning paradigm for conducting
large-scale, business-to-business (B2B) transactions on the Web has
developed.
"Traditional" business-to-consumer (B2C) shopping sites have their
place, but their record is spotty. Neither Web "marketplaces" nor ASPs
(Application Service Providers, who provide application functionality
over the Web) have yet attained the success and ubiquity that their
boosters were promising just last year. Are Web services simply another
fad that will be replaced in six-to twelve-months with yet another
elusive Holy Grail? I can't answer that, but I can explain them and let
you make up your own mind.
Web services aren't a particular technology or a product; they're an
idea. IBM's Mark Colan defines Web services as "Internet-based modular
applications that perform a specific business task and conform to a
specific technical format." What does this mean in real terms?
Most of the World Wide Web is written in HTML, which only describes how
to present the data at a particular URL. I can do business with HTML,
but only in a manual and brittle way. For example, imagine that I'm a
pillow manufacturer. I can use a browser to manually place orders at
discountfeathers.com every month, and any information returned from the
vendor (discountfeathers.com) must be manually entered into my system
because the response would be in HTML. If I try to "scrape" information
from discountfeather.com's Web site with an application that pretends
to be a browser, then my application will break every time the vendor's
Web site changes. Not good. However, if discountfeathers.com would
allow me to send a purchase order to their Web site and if I could
receive an order confirmation and invoice from that site, then our
business-to-business relationship would be streamlined.
Discountfeathers.com could provide many such "information services" on
the Web. Anyone needing a lot of feathers at a low price could submit
purchase orders, receive order confirmations and invoices, make
payments, and track shipments in an integrated way instead of through a
clunky, manual HTML interface.
If you understand this concept, then you understand Web services. Web
services provide businesses a standard, widespread method of finding
business partners or vendors and quickly interoperate with those other
business' information systems in a secure, platform-independent way. A
Web service infrastructure requires standard ways to format the
messages to the services, to send and receive service requests and
results, to represent detailed technical descriptions of how to use
each service, and to search for services available on the Web. Upcoming
newsletters will describe some of the emerging standards for doing
these things.
Web services differ from B2C shopping sites, Web marketplaces, and ASPs
in a fundamental way: they let organizations conduct transactions with
other businesses while defining, themselves, how the interface works.
Web services may well be the foundation of the digital economy.
