Groups spar over Web standards

“Most vendors see Web services as a land-grab opportunity and are seeking to stake claims on territory,” says Ron Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink. “Customers are far from implementing many of these immature specifications so we have to interpret this land-grab standards mentality as a way for vendors to position their companies and their products as the platforms of choice for implementing this new breed of application.”

Read more at: NetworkWorld

IBM, Microsoft team on reliability spec for Web services

“Microsoft and IBM are concerned with the fact that the other proposed reliability spec focuses too much on reliability between two endpoints on a point-to-point communications path. They feel that is too brittle and confining,” says Ron Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink.

Read more at: NetworkWorld

Westbridge pulls in $10M

“XML and Web services traffic runs on today’s network relatively unimpeded,” said Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, a Web services-focused research firm in Waltham, Mass. “The biggest challenge for companies rewriting applications so that they can be accessed easily by suppliers and other outside parties is making sure those accessing the network are authorized and authenticated. Westbridge has a pretty robust, effective software offering that addresses the issue.”

Jason Bloomberg, a colleague of Schmelzer at ZapThink, expects XML traffic on the network to increase significantly over the next few years, which would drive the security market. The company expects the XML and Web services security market to grow from around $120 million in 2002 to more than $4 billion by 2006.

Read more at: The Daily Deal

Web services security vendors focus on access control, XML firewalls

That hasn’t changed much, as customers wait for vendors to finalize standards such as XML Key Management Specification (XKMS is for managing the keys needed to encrypt and decrypt Web services messages), says Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink, an analysis and consulting firm in Waltham, Mass.

Single-point authentication and access control are important because Web services can’t make users more efficient if those users have to enter a new user ID and password each time their request hits another application. “Larger entities might have [10,000, 20,000] or 30,000 users,” says Bloomberg, each of whom might have different access rights on dozens of different systems — access rights that need to be changed, or even withdrawn, as the employee’s responsibilities change or they leave the company.

Read more at: SearchSecurity

Web Services Standards: Maturing or Fracturing?

You may have noticed, as has Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst for Web services and XML analysis firm ZapThink, that “they’re entirely different groups with no overlap.” But fear not for standards wars, because Bloomberg thinks that while corporate politics are, as always, playing a role, the real reason that two different groups of companies produced these standards prototypes is that the Web services software vendors are splitting up the work among them.

Bloomberg said, “IBM, for example, was working on reliability, but they’re happy for Sun to do the heavy lifting. And as for the new WS-Security initiative, pretty much all the WS vendors are supporting it.” Indeed, he explained, “the idea behind both group’s organization is that for the sake of efficiency, it’s easier for small groups of companies to hammer a standard out and then let the WS community review and comment on it. Then, after a review period, both will probably be released as draft standards.”

Read more at: SD Times

Web Services Standards Get Messier

Is there something missing here? On the security side, we have all these major players, except Oracle and Sun, and on the reliability front, we’ve got a lot of heavyweights, except Microsoft and IBM. Now, as I report in “Web Services Standards: Maturing or Fracturing?” (page 22), some analysts, like Jason Bloomberg of ZapThink, think that it will all work out in the end. More than that, Bloomberg seems to believe that the companies divided up the work so that the overall standardization of Web services happens sooner rather than later.

Read more at: SD Times

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

Group adds backbone to Web services

Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at ZapThink, said WS-Reliability tackles one of the long-standing hurdles to Web services adoption, which also include security, management and transactions.

“The big problem with the way people are implementing Web services today is that they are using pretty brittle protocols like HTTP (hypertext transport protocol). It’s OK for your browser, but no one in their right mind is going to implement a travel reservation booking system with that,” said Schmelzer. “The application had better succeed or reliably fail. It shouldn’t be that the server didn’t respond.”

Read more at: ZDNet

Group Tackles Web Services Reliability

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, Cambridge, Mass., said reliability is the third critical roadblock to Web services adoption after security and management. The “WS-Reliability specification is an obvious no-brainer,” he said. This is “because 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.”

Yet, major players in the Web services world, namely IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp., have yet to weigh in on WS-Reliability, and ZapThink analysts said it would be difficult to “guarantee” reliability without those companies onboard.

Read more at: eWeek

IT Vendors Publish Web Services Messaging Spec

XML and Web services research firm ZapThink said reliability, along with process definition and execution, makes up the third critical roadblock to Web Services adoption after security and management.

“It’s interesting that there are no common members between today’s announcement and the WS-Policy/Trust/SecureConversation announcement last month [Sonic, Hitachi, Fujitsu, NEC, Oracle and Sun for today's announcement, and IBM, Microsoft, Verisign, BEA, SAP, and RSA Security for the December announcement],” said ZapThink Senior Analyst Jason Bloomberg. “This divergence may indicate a continuation of some of the infighting that has gone on between these groups, but then again, it may turn out that everybody is willing to cooperate on this one. In the grand scheme of things, WS-Reliability doesn’t present much of a threat to anyone, so ZapThink predicts that the IBM/Microsoft group is likely to accept this specification with little or no significant changes requested.”

Read more at: Internetnews.com