IBM customers generally bullish about Web services

IBM customers are expecting major benefits from the company's recently announced Web services plan, such as lower infrastructure costs and easier ways to link to trading partners.

However, they say that Big Blue needs to ensure all its business partners and developers work together to transform e-commerce in the manner the company has outlined.

At a press conference in New York last week IBM outlined Dynamic E-Business, a grand plan to help companies build applications that pull together information from multiple sources either internally, or externally over the Internet.

For its Web services plan, IBM intends to make the most of its WebSphere, DB2, Tivoli and Lotus products, and improve them with support for emerging standards such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP); Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI); and Web Services Description Language (WSDL). SOAP exchanges XML-based messages from one business application to another over the Internet. UDDI is a universal registry of resources, and WSDL standardizes how a service and its provider are described.

IBM joins industry heavyweights such as Microsoft, Sun and Oracle, in the Web services arena.

Users have high hopes for the iniative.

"[Web services] sparked my interest" because they would allow documents shared with trading partners to be changed automatically, says Dave Kulakowski, application development manager at Honeywell Aerospace Division. "But how many companies are in a position to use it? It's a great technology, but the rest of the industry needs to embrace [Web services]," he says.

Kulakowski says Honeywell would use IBM Web services within the company until the technology standards become stabilized and more companies implement some form of Web services.

Besides Honeywell, companies including Galileo International, He-witt Associates, Duck Head Ap-parel, CareTouch and Transacttools are looking into IBM's Web services and plan to implement them within a year.

Sam Johnson, CEO of Transacttools, says trading partners trying to connect to each other's legacy systems could go through an XML interface, rather than connecting to individual systems such as equity, settlement and fixed income in the financial community. Transacttools, a financial services application service provider in New York, will roll out IBM Web services to customers including J.P. Morgan, Capital International and Instanet.

Tim Hilgenberg, CTO at human resources consulting firm Hewitt Associates, says Web services, in general, have the potential to prevent customers from being locked into one vendor. "Web services are like Switzerland," because they're nonproprietary, so "customers won't have these pocketed islands and have to create the connectivity to reach these islands, which costs a lot," he says.

While some of the potential benefits of Web services are clear, other issues are not. For example, paying for Web services is one aspect that has yet to be explained, users say.

"There's no universal licensing under Web services," says Prasuna Dornadula, CTO at CareTouch, a Concord, Calif., health service. Businesses won't know if they are getting the best deal or how contracts will be negotiated and payment collected.

The challenge is trying to get business partners to implement Web services, says Henry Greene, CIO at Duck Head Apparel, a Winder, Ga., manufacturer of casual sportswear for men. Duck Head's customers include J.C. Penney, Sears and McRae's.

"Customers drove us into [electronic data interchange] because they demanded it, and it's hard for a vendor to push the customer into what they want unless it's proprietary," Greene says. Even if the customers buy into Web services, "they have such gigantic infrastructures, it's like turning around a battleship."

IBM Web services