Ilaina Jonas and Siobhan Kennedy
NEW YORK: IBM, Microsoft Corp. and other fierce technology sector competitors
are expected on Thursday to announce an alliance to hammer out standards to make
it easier and cheaper for companies to do business over the Web, sources
familiar with the project said on Tuesday.
The group, to be named the Web Services Interoperability Organization, will
work on standards for Web services, the new market for software that makes it
easier for different computer systems to share information. This will make it
easier for companies to carry out purchasing, insurance checking and other
activities online.
This is not the first time IBM and Microsoft have joined forces in the name
of Web services. They have worked together under the auspices of certain
Internet standards groups to develop underlying technical standards for Web
services.
The new group will also include BEA Systems Inc., the sources said. Other
likely members are leading technology giants such as Sun Microsystems Inc.,
Intel Corp. and Oracle Corp.
"All of these players that are typically not friendly with each other
are working together," John DiFucci, an analyst with CIBC World Markets
said, noting the general industry push behind Web services. "They've all
agreed on this ... and that's amazing."
Smaller companies such as integration software companies webMethods Inc.,
TIBCO Software and SeeBeyond Technology Corp. are also supporting Web services.
Reuters Plc owns a majority stake in TIBCO.
.Net Vs Java
On one side are companies supporting Microsoft's proprietary .Net Internet
technology. On the other are industry giants like International Business
Machines Corp. and BEA that support the rival Java software programming
language.
Java, originally developed by Sun Microsystems, is popular with developers
because it can run on almost any computer system. Applications developed using
Microsoft's programming language can run only on Microsoft's Windows operating
system.
Web services are designed to overcome these incompatibility problems by
wrapping data in a way any system can understand. "I think this is
important because it validates Microsoft's push into Web services," John
McPeake, an analyst with Prudential Securities said.
Hopefully, a new standard would allow any type of business data to be
repackaged as a Web service and linked to other software applications. That
makes it easier for companies to share data and do business, both internally and
with their partners, suppliers and customers over the Web.
"You have Microsoft and the other companies cooperating on a key
initiative that I think is an important IT (information technology) spending
driver over the next couple of years," McPeake said.
More standards needed
IBM, Microsoft and others have already joined to create standards including
such things as the Web services directory, known as UDDI, and other low-level
technical standards like SOAP, WSDL and XML, DiFucci said.
"There's still other standards that will need to evolve," DiFucci
said, naming areas such as security of Web services as a key issue. "They
have not, at least at this point, all come in full support of that."
(C) Reuters Limited.