Infravio Aims to Make Web Services Easier for Unix Apps

by Alex Woodie

Infravio has announced new software intended to help organizations provide easy access to the business processes they're making available to customers or business partners as Web services. The new product, called X-registry, provides access to useful resources such as pricing information, service level agreements, and Web services demos, which consumers of Web services won't find in first-generation repositories, like UDDI.

While the class of software known as Web services has yet to live up to the hype that has surrounded it for the last four years, companies are beginning to adopt the technology, particularly for extending legacy systems in ways that developers of those tried-and-true systems never intended. Infravio, a young Silicon Valley firm that has developed Web services architectures and actual Web services (called "WSDLs," which is pronounced "wizdels" and is short for "Web Services Description Language"), finds that midsized and large companies are using Web services to break off pieces of their tightly integrated ERP applications and deliver them in new ways, as part of a service-oriented architecture. Infravio says its clients, which span the healthcare, telecommunications, and travel services industries, are mostly building off their core Unix applications.

Infravio is finding that history repeats itself. In much the same way that various parts of an organization in the late 1990s may have spawned their own Web sites--leaving you, kind Web surfer, to assemble the pieces to get a complete view of the company's Web presence--today Web services are "growing like mushrooms" at some companies, says Patrick Vallaeys, Infravio's vice president of marketing. "Large companies have a lot of Web services that have been developed by different groups, and they don't even know about each other," he says. "It is actually proliferating more than one might think."

A similar thing is happening at Sabre Holdings, the S&P 500 parent of Travelocity and other travel-related companies. Sabre picked Infravio to help it manage its new Web services strategy, which involves making back-end business processes, such as its airline, car, and hotel reservation systems, available to consumers and select business partners using Web service technologies. Sabre also purchased Infravio's Web services management suite, called Ensemble, which in January consisted of X-broker, its Web services delivery management software, and X-console, a Web services monitoring program it OEMed from partner NetIQ.

At the time, Infravio did not offer a Web services catalog. However, Sabre Holdings already had 50 Web services and planned to offer 50 more by the end of 2004. The two companies recognized that managing 100 Web services, each with its own authorization process, service level agreement, and pricing structure, would be a daunting task using existing Web services repositories, such as Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI). So Sabre worked with Infravio to develop a Web services registry that could handle it.

"The X-registry product is in fact the culmination of the shared vision between ourselves and Sabre about how to take Web services and put them in a registry that makes sense, how to promote Web services and allow consumers to come in and ask for Web services, enter into a process, and create a contract," says Infravio chief executive and president Jeff Tonkel. "That's what X-registry is all about."

As the third piece of the Ensemble suite, the X-registry provides a single point of access for all technical and business information about a company's Web services. For Web service providers, the X-registry offers IT managers a centralized place for storing WSDL, XML schema, and version information. On the Web services consumer side, business managers and analysts can use the X-registry to view descriptions of Web services as well as service level agreements, pricing information, and other details designed to assist with IT professionals' decision-making process. UDDI doesn't provide this level of detail for Web services consumers, Infravio officials point out.

"UDDI is woefully inadequate for what everybody wants it to do," Tonkel says. "It has many, many drawbacks. It's not wrong, but insufficient. [It was intended] only for the provider view. . . . Anybody could find your phone number and communicate. In the real world of integration, that doesn't go over very well. The service provider wants to have control over which services are being used, and maybe metering and billing. And UDDI does none of that."

Infravio hopes that X-registry will simplify the IT professional's job of finding, requesting, sampling, and registering for Web service access, while simultaneously making the Web service provider's tasks of tracking the Web services and their use easier. "What Amazon is for books, X-registry is for Web services," Tonkel says.

X-registry can function as the sole corporate registry, or it can work as a federated registry and be integrated with repositories, such as UDDI or ebXML (e-business using XML). The product also provides a roles-based user interface for four groups of IT professionals, including providers, consumers, administrators, and operations managers.

X-registry will begin shipping in June. Pricing is set at $35,000. For more information, go to www.infravio.com.