Hammering Out Web Services Links

Computerworld - By 12:50 p.m. Central time on Feb. 28, Verizon Communications Inc. had already logged 1.7 million Web services transactions for tasks like looking up customer addresses and selling new services.

The New York-based telecommunications company averages about 2.5 million to 3 million Web services transactions a day, anchored by its mostly homegrown service-oriented architecture (SOA), a platform that was two and a half years in the making. Dubbed the IT Workbench, the SOA supports the design, deployment and management of Web services. It went operational early last year and has helped the company slash its IT budget by 50% by eliminating redundant systems inherited from the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE, which spawned Verizon.

Verizon has also tackled some of the most vexing hurdles associated with Web services as part of the IT Workbench project, such as managing and securing the services, charging for reuse and monitoring the performance of service-enabled transactions.

IT Workbench

The project was born in 2002 as executives began looking to reduce inefficiencies in software development, says Shadman Zafar, Verizon's senior vice president of architecture and services. Consolidating application development was key for Verizon, which found itself with multiple groups often duplicating efforts after the merger.

Executives focused on the 250 most-important business transactions the company performed, such as verifying customer credit histories and looking up customer information. On average, each transaction had been developed five to 25 times; one was deployed 45 different times, Zafar says. The duplication was draining developer productivity and created needless ongoing maintenance costs.

The company decided to use Web services to expose the application programming interfaces of common transactions as XML, which could be consumed by the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) standard and used by multiple lines of business.

Zafar says he spent much of 2002 and 2003 evangelizing to developers about the potential benefits of Web services—especially to the two "religious" camps of .Net and Java developers. Despite some initial resistance, these groups warmed to Web services once project leaders demonstrated that the standards could allow .Net developers to consume Web services-enabled Java applications and Java developers to use .Net Web services, Zafar says.

His efforts to promote the use of Web services were backed by Verizon's CIO, who included target metrics for Web services usage as performance measurements for company vice presidents. "Verizon took a very aggressive view of Web services," Zafar says. "We were not toying with it. We took it as a business metric, and we had to meet a very tough business metric."

Zafar set an initial target in 2004 of building 10 applications and 10 transactions on the IT Workbench as Web services. The company instead built 57 applications and 200 transactions. At the beginning of the year, Verizon was supporting 10,000 Web services transactions per day; by the end of 2004, the daily average had skyrocketed to 2.5 million to 3 million per day.