Politics Bedevil Web Services Standards . . .

Computerworld - . . . process, and "it's users who suffer from the fracture," laments Dave Chappell, VP and chief technology evangelist at Sonic Software Corp., a Bedford, Mass.-based subsidiary of Progress Software Corp. He also serves on the OASIS Web Services Reliability (WSR) committee that's drawing up a specification for reliable messaging, debating the right way to, say, receive acknowledgments in a SOAP message exchange. All to the good, except a fearsome foursome of Microsoft Corp., IBM, BEA Systems Inc. and Tibco Software Inc. back something called Web Services ReliableMessaging. And, no surprise here, there are conflicts between the two. Chappell says the quarrelsome quartet is welcome to join the OASIS effort. Also, he's been wooed by Microsoft to consider the virtues of its preferences. But he grumbles, "There are some corporate egos about who's first and who's driving the standard." No doubt the egos of Oracle Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc., who have reps on Chappell's committee, flare from time to time.

As it happens, Sonic Enterprise Service Bus 5.0 (formerly Sonic XQ) ships on April 28. ESB 5.0 uses a "services container" approach to Web services-based integration. It lets developers "plug" applications into a virtual bus for services such as data transformation and intelligent routing based on content. The 5.0 release will include Stylus Studio for XML developers and Orchestration Server, which helps you design business-process management into a Web services application. ESB 5.0 is the first major element of the Sonic Business Integration Suite, the rest of which, such as an XML Server, will appear in the next few months.

• The federated approach to user authentication gets a boost tomorrow when Secure Data In Motion Inc. (but far better known, according to marketing VP Tanya Candia, as Sigaba—you figure it out) releases Sigaba Secure Email, which complies with the Liberty Alliance 1.1 specification. The spec calls for one partner company to authenticate its own users and then pass an "assertion" of that authentication to its partner, relieving the user from logging onto the other system. The San Mateo, Calif.-based firm on April 30 will release Sigaba Secure Instant Messaging, which uses the same federated authentication technology.
  
  
  
  
• Remember the Ricochet? It was a 1990s VC-funded brainchild for hooking laptop users to a "national" wireless network. (Since when did half a dozen cities constitute the whole nation?) When it worked, it was wonderful, but slow. Well, corporate Windows and Mac OS X laptop users get another wireless WAN technology starting today when Venturi Wireless Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., releases the Venturi 100E. The device sits behind the company firewall and links users to a carrier, such as Verizon Wireless, which will be outfitted with the new Venturi 20, also ready today. The 100E has been optimized to handle bandwidth-hoggy Microsoft Exchange as well as GIFs, JPEGs and other commonly sent files. Venturi does some standard tricks with compression and caching, but what's clever is that its Venturi Transport Protocol (VTP) works in concert with or instead of TCP/IP. VTP is designed to reduce wireless interference and handles missed bits differently than TCP/IP. The 100E costs $17,900 and supports up to 100 users.
  
  
  
  
• Add BSM to your acronym memory lobe. You'll be hearing lots more about it. That's no BS, man. Business service management is the step beyond managed frameworks, such as Unicenter and Tivoli. BSM tools tie online business activity—say, transaction volume on an e-commerce site—to the network and systems administrator's trouble-ticket priorities. If it's important to the business and it depends on IT systems, you need to design your monitoring and management technology to that end and not just "instrument" everything on your network and computers willy-nilly, BSMers say. BMC Software Inc.'s recent acquisition of IT Masters International, its ownership of Remedy and its own Patrol line give it a breadth of technologies beyond most of its BSM rivals. Plus, the Houston company last week announced that it will package these systems to forge "the direct linkage of IT resources and management solutions with the goals of the overall business." Sounds good. But Helen Donnelly, VP of marketing at Managed Objects Inc. in McLean, Va., objects to ceding them any ground and dismisses her competitor's ability to bolt together these disparate products. Donnelly says Formula 3.1, her company's product, uses a less-is-more approach, putting BSM agents in as few places as possible. She argues that competing products give IT too much information. "You can't manage from a million points of light," she says. Indeed. Hard to connect all the dots.