Search is on for Web services standards

Three standards bodies are cooperating on the complex task of creating protocols and architecture guides to manage Web services , the last major stumbling block deterring development and widespread adoption of the technology.

Experts say the effort will need to overcome historic difficulties in getting standard network management protocols widely and consistently deployed.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF ) are working on separate pieces of a puzzle that will let corporations manage Web services components internally and across partner networks.

"We are aligning the architecture work of the W3C, the protocol work of OASIS and the Common Information Model developed by the DMTF," says Winston Bumpus, chair of the OASIS Management Protocol Technical Committee  and president of the DMTF. "None of these groups has all the expertise to solve this problem. So all the groups working in a unified way is the right thing to do."

Work in its infancy

Bumpus says the work is in its infancy, highlighted by the fact that OASIS doesn't even have a name for its protocol. He says his committee, started in September, will meet in January and hopes to have a concrete protocol on the table by mid-2003 to go along with architecture guidelines that the W3C's Management Task Force, which also formed in September, is developing.

Management and security are two high-profile issues inhibiting the adoption of Web services technology, which promises to make it easier to integrate systems among multiple corporate networks using standard interfaces. Many network executives are waiting for those standards to be mature before considering the use of Web services outside of pilot programs.

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A survey this month by the Patricia Seybold Group showed that 85% of network executives plan to have Web services deployed in the next 12 months, but they say lack of standards is the chief hurdle.

"It's important to come out of this with one answer on how you do Web services management," says Heather Krieger, Web services architect for IBM and a member of the W3C and OASIS management groups. "Different parts of the problem will be solved in different standards organizations, but we have to cooperate."

Widespread adoption needed

Coupled with cooperation, experts say, is the need for widespread adoption and homogeneous implementation across vendors' products, which historically has not been the case with management standards.

"The primary management protocol used today is SNMP, which was developed in 1987," says Cameron Haight, research director for Gartner. "The good news is that management isn't new technically." On the other hand, Haight says, "Web services adds a lot of moving parts to an already complex puzzle." He says management must take place vertically in what he calls the Web services layer and horizontally on the network components that support them, such as Web application servers.