Third-party vendors fill in Web services holes

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By Tom Sullivan

(IDG) -- While the major companies promoting Web services are garnering the lion's share of attention, a number of smaller companies this week will announce products that enable the building and delivering of Web services.

The big guns driving Web services thus far -- Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Oracle, and Hewlett-Packard -- primarily will offer the frameworks and tools for building Web services, but will look to third parties to fill in some of the blanks, analysts said.

"The rolling out of strategies by the big guys makes it inevitable that smaller companies will pop up with solutions that run on [the major vendor's] platforms," said David Smith, vice president of Internet strategies at consultancy Gartner Group, in Stamford, Conn. "In some cases, they're taking things more from the business perspective than the big players."

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Smith continued that customers tend to look at the business reasons for moving toward Web services, rather than doing so for technology's sake.

This week will see a number of companies touting a variety of new Web services-enabling products, several of them demonstrating to customers the solid business reasons for considering Web services.

Webgain, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based, tools vendor, will unveil an assembly tool that integrates application components so they can be delivered as Web services, according to a source. The announcement will be made on Wednesday at Gartner Group's ITxpo in Florence, Italy.

Back in the United States, San Francisco-based Avinon on Monday announced NetScenario, an application platform on which companies can transform their existing infrastructure into modular Web-based applications, according to Kamran Kheirolomoom, the company's CEO.

Earlier this month, Avinon joined the UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) industry initiative to standardize how Web services are registered and found.

Avinon, like several other third-parties that are emerging with Web services products, is vendor neutral.

Velocigen, based in San Diego, this week plans to roll out software that can unify content and applications across a variety of systems, allowing it to be exposed to the Web, and thereby offered as a Web service.

By supporting the current de facto Web services standards -- UDDI, XML, SOAP (simple object access protocol), and WSDL (Web service description Language -- Velocigen's product lets companies offer Web services from their existing infrastructures, said Tony Darugar, president and chief software architect at Velocigen.

Curl, a Cambridge, Mass.-based spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is set by the end of this month to commercialize an infrastructure specifically for delivering Web services.

A host of other companies, including Bowstreet and Epicentric, also provide vendor-neutral products that operate on top of Web services platforms from the major vendors.

Gartner's Smith said that these early movers have their work cut out.

"The biggest issue is that they are working with cutting-edge technology that in a lot of people's minds is still unproven," he said.

Smith continued that marketing blitzkriegs from the likes of Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Oracle, and HP should help users become familiar with the concept.

"The more they highlight the advantages and benefits, and evangelize Web services, the better off we are," Avinon's Kheirolomoom said.

In the meantime, customers are starting to weave their way toward early iterations of Web services.

CSE Insurance Group, San Francisco, for instance, is using Avinon's product to tie its disparate data systems together so they can provide a quoting service, wherein customers or underwriters complete the necessary forms online, then get a quote back within minutes.

Jim Pierson, a business consultant at CSE, said the process previously was conducted manually and took at least one hour. He added that CSE has been trying since 1998 to extend its systems in this fashion.

"Strategically, we want to increase the ease of doing business with us. But we couldn't redesign our systems. We needed them in place, so we extended them to tap into Web services across the Web," Pierson said.

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Filling in the picture on Web services
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Microsoft Corp.
Sun Microsystems
IBM

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