Web services pioneers report minimal pain, plenty of gain

National Student Clearinghouse has built a Web service that streamlines and automates one of its key business processes. And the good news, according to NSC and other network executives who have launched Web services projects, is that Web services doesn’t come with a steep learning curve or crushing price tag.

National Student Clearinghouse has built a Web service that streamlines and automates one of its key business processes.

And the good news, according to NSC and other network executives who have launched Web services projects, is that Web services doesn’t come with a steep learning curve or crushing price tag.

“One of our biggest learning experiences was that we tried to overunderstand Web services. In other words, we were expecting to learn some new crazy technology,” says Doug Falk, CIO for the NSC in Herndon, Va., which provides university and college degree and enrollment verification services.

“When you get right down to it, it is nothing more than another application. Sure, you have a Web services standard that provides message transport and XML, which defines the data format. But other than that, it’s just a normal computer application,” he says.

Falk, however, cautions that the technology is in an initial adoption phase that consists primarily of data and application integration within a corporation. The next two steps – supporting transactions and automating business processes that flow among companies – will take additional standards and more time and money to become reality.

Today’s typical investments in Web services projects involve thousands of dollars and a handful of developers, but that eventually will morph into tens of millions of dollars and dedicated IT manpower, experts say.

“Companies are not changing a whole lot of the systems that they already have. They are developing new ways to get at things,” says Johna Till Johnson, president and chief research officer at Nemertes Research and a Network World columnist. But the game changes when companies bite hook, line and sinker. “When you put all your applications into a Web services model and include hardware changes, building redundancy, support and documentation, the average cost of a Web services rollout is about $10 million,” she says.

But today, companies are content to spend much less money and effort on Web services because they already are reaping tangible benefits.

At NSC, an investment of $50,000 and a handful of developers working for six months produced two Web services. One streamlines requests for degree and enrollment verifications from employers, insurers, lenders and those who needed information on current or former students. A second automates NSC’s retrieval of that information from nearly 7,000 universities, colleges and professional schools.

Under the old system, NSC, which executes nearly 100 million transactions per year, required its customers to fill out forms on an NSC Web site, which meant customers had to rekey data already in their systems.

Through a Java-based Web service, customers now can send data directly to NSC just by retrofitting their client software to support Web services standards. The client puts the data in an XML document that is sent via HTTP in an “envelope” based on the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) to the NSC Web service. The client locates the service using a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file, a pointer to an Internet address that amounts to a traditional URL. The envelope is opened, and the message is read by a Java application, which formulates a query to an Informix database running on IBM’s AIX. The Java application receives the response, translates it back into XML and sends it to the requester via the same route.

NSC also uses Apache Web servers and the Apache Access SOAP engine to facilitate the transaction, and software from Flamenco Networks to authenticate and secure the communication. NSC does not use the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) protocol, a sort of Yellow Pages of available Web services, because it knows who its clients are.

“What we’re talking about is a faster system that requires less human intervention, has fewer errors and is lower in cost,” says Mark Jones, vice president of business development and marketing for NSC. “We figure for each client that adopts the Web service, we will see a 33% increase in volume. So that translates into $25,000 to $50,000 a month fairly quickly.”

So far, NSC has about 30 customers willing to update their own internal applications and many others exploring the possibility. But interest by member schools has not been as hot. Most continue to provide updates via FTP.

But with the ball rolling, NSC sees other benefits, including potential changes to its business model. “We have the potential to partner with someone like a PeopleSoft and build access to our Web service directly into their software and have them act as a distribution channel. That has the potential to greatly expand the number of people that have access to our service,” Jones says. “We are certainly looking at how this reshapes our future.”

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