Web Services Mature, See More B2B Transaction Use

Companies launch projects to link to business partners

July 25, 2005 (Computerworld)

Buoyed by improved technology and maturing standards, many IT operations are ramping up efforts to extend the use of Web services from application integration projects to ones involving business-to-business transactions.

For example, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc., this month purchased Web services management tools in preparation for a major development project that's due to begin this fall.

Starwood plans to move its loyalty business application and its core IT system—a reservation and booking engine—off its mainframe, said Tom Conophy, chief technology officer at the White Plains, N.Y.-based company.

The project is part of a 4-year-old effort to migrate from mainframe-based systems to distributed hardware running Linux and Unix. The new IT platform will include a services layer to expose business logic to Starwood's call centers and its partners in the sales channel and other areas.

By March 2006, Starwood plans to begin moving its 700 hotels to the new reservation system while boosting the number of Web services it has in production from 60 to 150.

Conophy said Starwood will use a Web services broker and a centralized control console tool from Actional Corp. in Mountain View, Calif., to replace homegrown tools cobbled together two years ago.

"We wanted better automation to track performance of services, the latency of services and to tell us if something is outside of the norm so we could take action on it," Conophy said.

Savings Anticipated

Migrating the reservations application off the mainframe will cost between $10 million and $60 million, Conophy said. In the end, however, he expects the entire mainframe migration to net $10 million to $20 million in annual savings.
Stratus Technologies Inc., a maker of fault-tolerant servers, last month went into production with a Web services business-to-business system that replaced its proprietary system for managing invoicing, order confirmation and shipment document exchanges with its contract manufacturers.
Maynard, Mass.-based Stratus used an enterprise service bus (ESB) from Waltham, Mass.-based Cape Clear Software Inc. to replace a messaging system that directly exchanged data between its own ERP system and those of its manufacturers.

Cecelia LeBlanc, IS manager at Stratus, said the company expects the ESB to lower maintenance costs by 70% and boost productivity by 20%.

Escaping the Enterprise

Vendors, meanwhile, have been enhancing their tools to support Web services outside the enterprise.

Earlier this month, SOA Software Inc. in Santa Monica, Calif., announced a new version of its XML VPN Web services tool set that added support for digitally signing messages. And Oracle Corp. unveiled an integrated business process platform designed to help companies secure and manage internal or external Web services.

Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass., said the use of Web services for external transactions is reaching a tipping point, as vendors beef up their products to address critical challenges such as services orchestration and security based on maturing standards.

Thomson Learning, a professional and academic testing company in Stamford, Conn., has finished a project undertaken with its business partners to develop a system that uses Web services to schedule tests and transmit scores.

This month, the company will begin working on a system to manage the identity verification process in its business-to-business transactions. The goal is to make it possible for its partners to easily pass through various Web services as a back-end security token server automatically verifies end-user identities, said Christopher Crowhurst, Thomson vice president and principal architect.

WEB SERVICES SPREAD

How do you envision using Web services within your organization in the next year? 69% Internal application integration 60% Integration with partners and customers 30% Building composite applications 8% We don’t plan to use Web services in the coming year 2% Other Base: Survey of 200 IT and business managers Respondents could choose all that applied. Source: Computerworld, February 2005