Commerce One patent sale could hinder small businesses

“The worst-case scenario for the industry is that some companies are extorted to pay money for royalties they cannot afford, and it begins to affect business,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC of Waltham, Mass. He said a $50 million bill for royalties may be insignificant to a company of Microsoft’s size, but such a bill could affect the way a smaller company does business.

Bloomberg added that Web services innovation is likely to stay strong, because companies will license the technology if there is a solid business case to do so.

“The best-case scenario is that we never hear of this again,” Bloomberg said.

ZapThink’s Bloomberg wasn’t buying it, however.

“This cloak-and-dagger stuff doesn’t sound like one of big players; they wouldn’t do this funny stuff,” Bloomberg said. “This sounds like a smaller player wanting to make a splash.”

“The bigger concern and the danger the industry faces, with what’ s happening with file sharing and open source, is that we are slowly eroding the value of IP because we are forcing people to circumvent IP in order to be innovative,” said ZapThink founder and senior analyst Ronald Schmelzer. “The last thing you want to do is decay the value of IP, because it’s getting harder to base a business on IP. Others can always claim prior art.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Industry group might buy Commerce One patents

The Commerce One patents cover methods for companies to communicate with each other and provide certain types of information when carrying out machine-to-machine transactions over the Internet, Van Pelt said. Patents from the Santa Clara, California, company, which was a pioneer of electronic marketplaces, could cover technologies widely used by other companies, said Zapthink LLC analyst Ronald Schmelzer.

Read more at: IT World

Web Security Protocols Pass Muster

According to OASIS meeting minutes, the spec had been briefly held up because of some disagreement with regard to a technical issue from a Hitachi committee member over Universal Resource Identifiers (URI), a member of a universal set of names in registered name spaces and addresses referring to registered protocols or name spaces. The WS-Security committee passed it with the idea of resolving the URI issue later.

ZapThink Senior Analyst Jason Bloomberg said the passage is an important milestone in the development of interoperability standards. The analyst, whose firm covers XML and Web services issues, told internetnews.com the hiccup is a typical occurrence when vendors come together to hammer out a standard as important as WS-Security, and illustrates how much of a challenge reaching consensus on such standards can be. The resulting standards promise to be robust and widely applicable.

For OASIS, the move to embrace SOAs, (define) which may serve as the underpinning for Web services development, marks a departure from the organization’s previous approach of pushing ebXML alone for supporting global Web-based transactions, according to ZapThink Senior Analyst Ronald Schmelzer.

“At first, it seemed that the group was presenting a competitive alternative to Web Services with their ebXML specifications, and as a result, the specifications languished with lack of adoption,” Schmelzer told internetnews.com. “They have now taken a much more positive tack with their whole-hearted adoption of SOA as the cornerstone of their ebXML message, and with it, a much more positive stance towards inclusion with Web Services specifications.”

Read more at: internetnews.com

Security experts take safe option and agree

You know when something is really fundamental and important— and not quite working yet- when no vendor wants to rock
the boat. It seemed that we were in such an area at the “Web Services Security — Is It Enough?” panel chaired by Jason Bloomberg
(of analysts Zapthink) at the XML & WebServices 2003 show at Olympia in March (hands up time — the show organisers
are the people behind ADA, but, hey, if it’s interesting it’s interesting). The panel included security experts such as Mark
O’Neil of Vordel, freelance Microsoft authors such as Andy Olsen and, for good measure, Patrick Gannon, OASIS President and CEO — and they all agreed about everything.

Read more at: Application Develpoment Advisor

OASIS Forms Committee to Promote BPEL

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, a Cambridge, Mass., market research firm, said: “The submission of BPEL to OASIS is a great step for BPEL as well as Web Services in general. BPEL is a key specification aimed at providing a mechanism by which Web Services can be orchestrated into business processes, which can then be exchanged and choreographed with external processes. Business process is a critical aspect of adoption of Web Services and especially Service-Oriented Architectures since business processes are how companies define their business requirements that must then be implemented with Web Services. Without process, all you have is a jumble of Web Services. Specifications like BPEL bring order to the chaos by specifying a logical flow by which Web Services can be orchestrated to meet defined business requirements.”

Read more at: eWeek

Service-Oriented Process

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Service-Oriented Process

Business processes have always been an important, if understated, asset of enterprises. The nature and methods by which a company runs its business changes on a daily basis at various different levels in the company — from high-level strategic changes to lower-level implementation details. As a result of these changes, enterprises constantly struggle to make their businesses more responsive to business changes by connecting their business requirements to their IT and human capabilities.

However, automating business processes has historically been a difficult-to-achieve goal for most enterprises due to the flexibility of their IT infrastructure. Fortunately, businesses have a solution in Service-Oriented Process: a separate abstraction layer for business process definition and execution that leverages the capabilities of Service-oriented Architectures. Service-Oriented Process provides businesses an approach to tying business requirements to the Service model represented in the SOA metamodel, thereby providing a flexible approach towards implementing architectures that promote business agility.

ZapNote: Commerce One

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All Aboard for Commerce One’s Conductor

ZapThink Senior Analyst Jason Bloomberg, who spoke with Commerce One recently, said he got the idea Commerce One is betting the company on Conductor.

“The company has been through too many ups and downs and has been in the red for too long,” Bloomberg told internetnews.com. “That being said, Conductor looks like a strong, comprehensive offering in the Service Orientation space. Commmerce One’s strengths in the CPG, retail, automotive, and discrete manufacturing verticals gives them a great niche to build out their offering, as many other vendors are focusing on financial services, government, and healthcare.”

ZapThink Senior Analyst Ronald Schmelzer said Commerce One is entering new ground, one fraught with heavy competition.

Read more at: Internetnews.com

WS-Reliability Spec in OASIS’ Hands

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, Cambridge, Mass., said, “Developers and IT organizations won’t implement any important Web services without being able to guarantee that they will be executed in a guaranteed manner.”

Read more at: eWeek