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IBM Dreams Itself to the Top of the Web Services World
by Kristin Palitza
If you had to use a single word to describe IBM's Web services vision, it would be heterogeneity. IBM claims it is committed to this strategy and willing to cooperate with its rivals if that is what it takes to keep ahead of the competition. "Web services will be published by one, but have to be readable by all," said John Swainson, general manager for application and integration at IBM's middleware division, at the company's Web Services Day last week.
Every Web service has to be able to run in both J2EE and .NET environments, Swainson said. "We collaborate on standards, but we compete in implementation" is the IBM Web services motto. IBM claims an urgent need for heterogeneity particularly because its biggest Web services rival, Microsoft, is known for favoring the opposite strategy: proprietary technologies and a one-system-fits-all approach. "Microsoft has to cooperate, particularly for Web services," IBM executives told journalists during a Q&A session. "The world is heterogeneous. Companies have to be able to work with all kinds of systems, from any vendor."
Other core IBM rivals, such as Sun Microsystems, BEA Systems, and Oracle, have jumped on the Web services bandwagon, trying to elbow their way to the top. IBM says in extreme confidence, however, that it does not fear competition from any rivals but one, Microsoft. "In the long run there are only two companies that will be able to provide an entire e-business infrastructure to customers, and that's IBM and Microsoft," claimed IBM director of marketing for WebSphere Scott Hebner.
Of course, Hebner expects IBM to win this race, which, in his opinion, will be a fight between a heterogeneous IBM environment versus a Wintel-only platform. "Microsoft might do well in the consumer and small business space, where you don't need to deal much with heterogeneity and security, but in the enterprise space heterogeneity is a fact and security is important," Hebner reckoned. And that's where he predicts IBM's major wins.
On their way to the top, IBM and Microsoft have developed a love-hate relationship. Although competitors, they cooperate in the Web Services Interoperability Organization. It is also rumored that IBM will later this year extend support for some major Microsoft Passport authentication technology.
IBM makes it seem like the other major Web services players--Sun, Oracle, and BEA--are barely worth mentioning. Hebner played down BEA as "only a point-product business around the J2EE application server." The app server is not the core of the value proposition anymore; the entire middleware platform is, including application development tools and infrastructure, Hebner said. BEA is far behind IBM in this area, he claimed. BEA just launched its first integration toolset, called Workshop. "They will be marginalized over time," Hebner said.
The same goes for Oracle, a database point provider in Hebner's view. Although he admitted that Oracle "is getting much more serious and aggressive" with its 9i application server, he said 9i is "still a little behind" and "very database focused." Hebner also called Oracle's Web services support "immature, particularly in the tools."
As for Sun, Hebner acknowledged Sun has what he called an "infrastructure vision," but said that Sun is not an important rival to IBM, since it has only about 5 percent of the J2EE market. "Sun might be in the background to provide certain tools," Hebner said.
As for its own strategy, IBM admits that Web services development is still in early stages and "not a finished technology." Developers just figured out the core protocols for Web services, such as SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI, and will now have to overcome major thresholds, such as security and reliability, as well as transactions, workflow, provisioning, and systems management. However, IBM already promises that "the entire WebSphere portfolio will inherently support Web services."
IBM says it already has thousands of customers using Web services capabilities through the WebSphere platform. The company is embedding its Java-based business process integration software--which it acquired by buying CrossWorlds Software for $129 million last October--into its WebSphere application server. Once CrossWorlds' tools are part of WebSphere, IBM will offer its own enterprise application integration tools for the first time. In the past, it depended on partners for such tools, including Sybase's Neon and Peregrine Systems' Extricity. IBM said it will hold on to those alliances, though.
Swainson said at the Web Services Day that revenue for WebSphere, IBM's flagship Web services product suite, grew 43 percent in the fourth quarter of 2001 and that WebSphere sales were up 40 percent in 2001 compared to 2000. He said that, because of those growth rates, IBM probably took the lead away from BEA in 2001 for J2EE-enabled application servers. "We will see what the analysts come up with," Swainson added. Last year, IBM archrival BEA was heading the $4.2 billion J2EE app server space with 36 percent market share, closely followed by IBM, with 34 percent, according to researcher Giga Information Group.
Swainson further said the positive WebSphere growth rate is based on an enormous development effort. IBM has dedicated about 20,000 people to its development labs and has invested $700 million in WebSphere technology development alone and "another couple of million" dollars in WebSphere sales and marketing.
On the data level, IBM plans to augment all of its database products with Web services features, said IBM distinguished engineer and director of information integration Nelson Mattos. "DB2 will focus on Web services integration on the information level," he said. DB2 will provide Web services with its caching capabilities to reduce traffic and workflow while increasing performance. "DB2 feeds directly to the cache. We will make Web services look at any data as if it is all stored in a single database, although information will come from a wide variety of data sources," Mattos explained. DB2 will provide cross-platform data storage, he said.
IBM's Lotus division will adopt its parents' Web services vision and offer Web services "from a customer-centric view," which is "absolutely essential in a heterogeneous mix-and-match environment," said IBM Lotus software technical strategist Carl Kraenzel. Domino 6, due to ship in the third quarter of this year, will be much more tightly integrated with WebSphere, as IBM has promised and most people say is necessary. Customers will be able to seamlessly blend a personal calendar into a corporate Internet portal, for example. IBM's goal is to offer a Web services layer in all of its Lotus products, Kraenzel said, admitting that "today we are only at the halfway-point of where we want to get." Next year, IBM will release some early Web-services-enabled versions of Lotus products for people to play with, he promised.
Other corner points of IBM's Web services strategy are business-on-demand and grid computing. In those areas, "Web services will take off like a rocket," predicts IBM Global Services vice president of business development Scott Penberthy. Customers will be able to purchase Web services on demand by credit card, Penberthy said. Web services are cheaper when they are shareable, he added.
Grid services, the automated use of computing resources across network-connected servers, will also be at a low cost point, because of their standard nature, Penberthy said. Grid services include standards for using computing resources. IBM is planning to interlink Web services and grid services data at some point over the next couple of years. The company made a first step in this direction two weeks ago, when it announced jointly with the Globus Project a set of new specifications that would allow the sharing of applications and computing resources over the internet. IBM and the Globus Toolkit open-source team launched the Open Grid Services Architecture, or OGSA, a set of specs and standards to combine grid computing and Web services on a J2EE base.
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