IBM Talks Web ServicesTim Anderson grills Jason Weisser, Vice President of Enterprise Integration at IBM, about the role and future of XML web services.Jason describes himself as “the guy who owns the development and implementation of these technologies for all of IBM worldwide.”Tim: Let’s kick of with some examples of problems that are suited to a Web Service solution.Jason: It’s things like business-to-businesss, supply chain enablement, supply management, inventory, MRO (Maintenance Repair and Operating), where you have lots of different companies dealing with lots of different buyers, all of whom have different kinds of back end systems. These are usually disparate systems that need to be able to adjudicate bills, manage inventory. Web services play that lingua franca role of being able to help communication across these diverse environments.For example, say you have different organizations within a company, perhaps through merger or acquisition, that have to be able to interact and interoperate. Rather than changing out large infrastructure or legacy back-ends, you’re able to use interoperability standards, web services by and large, to create a degree of communication between systems which natively don’t communicate with one another.Tim: Can you give me some examples of where they have been implemented successfully?Jason: We’re doing this all over the world with large customer accounts. Volvo, Shell, these are just the tip of the iceberg.It used to be if we wanted to build an application it had to be fairly heavy. You had lots of objects, and if you wanted to call the object you had to go through the whole operational framework of an application. Now we’re actually able to build these applications in virtual formats using these interoperability standards and these communication and routing standards.For us web services is an over-used term. It doesn’t fully encapsulate all of the impact that these standards-based technologies are enabling.Tim: Some people are questioning whether there is really a high take-up for web servicesJason: We’re seeing a tremendous level of adoption at very senior enterprise levels. For example, we have a couple of projects that we’ll be rolling out here in the next few weeks. One of them I can announce, which is with Pep Boys, a large automotive supply retailer in the US and Canada. They have 700 stores, and they’re looking to grow to a couple of thousand stores. We are building a service-oriented architecture from the ground up with them, which will rely entirely on service-based standards, utilising our mediation technology.You asked earlier where our applications are going, and WAS [Websphere Application Server] is a great example. WAS is morphing over the next year or so into a complete web-service based environment, where it becomes much more dynamic in terms of routing , mediation, transport, and message management, than we’ve seen before. It is using these technologies to drive all of this. We’re looking for example at semantic brokering in order to accomplish this across domains. So it creates a whole new economy on the performance side.Tim: What do you mean by “Semantic brokering”?Jason: If you look for example at the insurance industry, there’s a set of standards, web service standards, called ACCORD. These are semantic standards that the industry has agreed to use relative to the way in which inter-company activity and processes are managed within the insurance industry. The same is true in the Telco industry with a thing called PARLAY, another set of standards.These are web services, much like BPEL [Business Process Engineering Language], and what they do is to take BPEL to the next level and say, OK, here’s BPEL from a business process standpoint. Now we’re going to attach to it a set of semantic guidelines so this is BPEL specific to insurance, or BPEL specific to finance, or BPEL specific to the Telco industry. It creates a level of specificity that we’ve never had before.The industries themselves are embracing the standards efforts, and employing them as they evolve their business. So it’s no longer simply a technology issue, it’s now business owners driving the technology. IBM has positioned itself saying, tell us what the business issues are, and we will create enablement protocols to make them happen from a technical standpoint. It’s mapped from our modelling tools, for example Business Integratrion Modeller, and directly form our development tools, such as Rational XDE.To say that we embrace this technology is an understatement. We have committed to a long term strategy around componentisation and distributed application management and mediation, and all of our products reflect that. The first set of those products comes out in the summer, with the release 6.0 of WAS and the release 8.0 of UDB [DB2 Universal Database for z/OS version 8]. All of the products will reflect this. At some point or other what will happen is the products will be fully componentised, at which point they truly become service based offerings. That’s where we’re moving.Tim: An early criticism of web services was lack of security, guaranteed delivery, transaction support. How is this changing?Jason: Forget about XML web services for a moment, because there are other service standards that are not necessarily XML based, such as binary XML. But the big answer to your question is that we have seen in the last 18 to 24 months a significant willingness on the vendors’ parts to agree to agree. We’re seeing this around the WS-I [Web Services Interoperability Organization], which is looking at transactions, mediation, security.There is a greater degree of agreement now among the vendors because frankly they’re getting to the point where they can begin to support these standards. Some of their earlier servers had difficulty with that. I won’t mention names. Now that these companies are better able to support the standards, they’re more willing to say OK, we agree. We’re seeing a huge acceleration of the standards development around interoperability, transactions and security, and also around management.At the core of IBMs belief in a mediated environment using web services is that there has to be a very dynamic management infrastructure, one that allows for managing quality of service, that allows for managing service delivery commitment, that allows for managing security and single sign-on issues, that allows for all the contingencies that have to be audited, metered and managed within the context of a distributed, mediated environment. We are deploying this today.Tim: So does IBM already have the standards it needs?Jason: We’re far from having everything we need, but … I would say we’re 60% down the road of having the core standards that allow for true interoperability. And they’re hardened, enough for the IBMs and the Microsofts of the world to use. If you look at what Microsoft is doing and what we’re doing, we’re moving forward on the assumptions around certain standards, for example transact and mediation, interop, choreography. And everyone’s agreed around BPEL. We showed with Microsoft last Fall the web service security piece, that we can interoperate and exchange PKIs to Kerberos. We do this now, we can guarantee this to customers, we can show them on an SLA [Service Level Agreement] how they perform. I would say that it’s definitely ready for prime time.Our recommendation to customers is that they incrementalise. This is not a case of changing the world overnight. This is something that you incrementalise based on business need.Tim: What about older distributed technologies, such as CORBA and Java RMI Are they being replaced, or do they still have a role?CORBA is going the way of the Dodo bird, but we’ve extracted from CORBA some of the lessons learned. Some of the code, and some of the fundamental aspects of what CORBA was about is integrated into the new technology. EAI [Enterprise Application Integration] will go away. If you look at the EAI application vendors, they are all retooling their applications now into web services. It’s basically saying, EAI doesn’t work any more and now we have new technologies. To some extent they’ll succeed and to some extent they won’t. These are not companies that are by and large application management companies. From a distributed standpoint they were putting all the spaghetti into a box and as long as it stayed in the box everything was Jim Dandy. But if you want to take it out of the box, it gets messy.IBM is not in the application business, it is in the integration business. The middle tier is where all of this is going to take place. Quite frankly I think there is only a few companies that can truly stick their stake in the ground and say this is our space. I think these smaller vendors will contribute to some of these niche technologies. I think the standards are hardening and we’re seeing this across the industry. And I think we’re looking at a change in paradigm, a major change in paradigm. It’s the most exciting thing I’ve seen in the history of this industry, in my 30 years in it I’ve never seen anything like this before.Tim: So how would you summarise the business benefits?Jason: What are the benefits? They’re outstanding. Loosely coupled applications, loosely coupled services, the use of services for movement of data and application capability, service enablement which allows for virtualization of resources, and preservation of existing legacy systems without the overhead attached to it, the list goes on. The ROI is substantial. We’re seeing huge savings.If you look at the banking industry where they’re coming out of very large mainframe legacy systems, they don’t have to scrap everything and start all over again. Through the use of adaptor-based technologies and an SOA [Service Oriented Architecture], we can tap straight into those, and have them be service enabled, and use that data through things like CICS or other TPS [Transaction Processing] Systems. They retain all their value. The customer benefits by having a level of management they’ve never had before.Tim: What about the performance problems with XML?Jason: For performance XML could be a problem. It depends on how it’s used, and that’s why you want to create a mediation layer. At the mediation layer where the parsing takes place, that’s where we usually do a lot of conversion to binary XML, at which point we’re seeing a 400% improvement in performance. That’s substantial. It’s happening under the covers so the customer doesn’t have to fret about it. They just have to bring the WSDL [Web Service Description Language] or the XML in, and the rest is behind the covers.Performance-wise, parsing engines are getting better and better. We saw about a 150% improvement when we implemented a new engine for SOAP on our last release of WAS, and we’ll see that continue to improve. We’re also going to see some of the standards around how schemas are composed and how headers are added, and how we manage data, we’re going to see economies, new effective ways of writing the schema to reduce some of the issues on performance. It’s not 100% but it’s 90% of the way there.Tim: What about versioning? Say you have an existing service and you want to change it?Jason: We support common service based modelling. The WSDL is nothing more than a service that can be called through the management framework. If you need to change the content within the WSDL, you can do that through the service management console. It propagates down through the system, so everything that was looking for the old service is now seeing it as the same thing. Don’t forget, in an SOA the WSDL is just another virtual service object.In the framework of a Service Oriented Architecture you anticipate that these things will have to happen and you build a mediation framework that supports it. And you do that through a single console interface.Tim: Can you say a little more about how WebSphere is evolving?Jason: WebSphere is our middleware platform. That includes everything from our application server to our business integration technologies to our database systems with DB2, to our management infrastructures under Tivoli, to our workplace management tools under Lotus, and our development tools with Rational. WebSphere is fully integrating all of that.I came from Microsoft. When I used to look at what IBM was doing it seemed to me a hodgepodge. At a distant it seemed to me to be a bunch of buckets and bolts that didn’t make a lot of sense. When I joined IBM I was given an opportunity to look under the covers. I was surprised to discover that the acquisition and development strategy of IBM software over the last 9 to 10 years has been intentional and focused. What Steve Mills [IBM Head of Software] and his team has done is to build a strategic, dynamic architecture for the middle tier. Most people didn’t see that at first because they didn’t have the overall perspective. Our products are moving towards a common runtime and, more importantly, a completely integrated component-based infrastructure. We’ll see this in the next two years across all our products. They will be fully component based, which means you apply only the components necessary.That gets to your performance question earlier. You don’t have any of those issues with a component architecture, particularly if you’re using that architecture in a service-based environment, which we believe is absolutely requisite to do. The evolution of that platform is predicated on that set of beliefs.Copyright Tim Anderson 6th April 2004. All rights reserved.
IBM WebSphere Software - Service Oriented Architecture: A New Model for Engagement
| Jason Weisser Vice President for IBM Software Group's Enterprise Integration Solutions (EIS) organization |
| ||||||||||||
Program Description:
Jason Weisser, Vice President, IBM SWG Enterprise Integration, explains the concept of the service oriented architecture (SOA) and its relationship to the on-demand operating environment. He discusses how SOA allows for the blending of relationships between programs from different vendors, languages, data structures, and presentation layers. Weisser show how SOA creates a “lingua franca” – a relationship between all these variables that allows for the free-flowing dynamic relationship to occur, independent of the operating systems or independent of the languages used to write the programs. Most importantly, he explains what SOA means for your organization, and examines how to engage with your customer in designing, developing, and deploying an SOA. Viewers also hear from Kerrie Holly, IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO, SOA and Web Services Center of Excellence at IBM. Holly discusses how your company can take advantage of best practices from real-world SOA implementation experiences.
By watching this program, you will:
v Learn what a service oriented architecture is, and its importance to your organization;
v Learn the steps in creating a dynamic relationship between the business and the technology of the SOA;
v Understand the questions to ask your organization as you design, develop, and deploy a service oriented architecture framework; and
v Understand the architecture of an SOA, and how the SOA model works in a real world scenario.
Viewers of the online and CD versions of the program have easy access to Web links that include: ‘IBM On Demand Operating Environment: Service Oriented Architecture’; ‘IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition Trial Program’ and ‘Understanding Quality of Service for Web Services.’ White papers include: ‘Migrating to a Service-Oriented Architecture’; ‘Service Oriented Architecture: An Introduction for Managers’; ‘Transforming Your Business to On Demand’ and ‘WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation V5.1.’
Program Topics:
INTRODUCTION
PROGRAM ROI
WHAT IS A SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE?
Characteristics of a Service Oriented Architecture: Loosely Coupled Services
Characteristics of a Service Oriented Architecture: Shared Services
Characteristics of a Service Oriented Architecture: Federated Control
Characteristics of a Service Oriented Architecture: Standards-Based
Service Oriented Architecture Allows Business Owners to Drive Changes in the Business
Service Oriented Architecture Is a Series of Contained Functionalities
Service Oriented Architecture Eliminates Obstacles to Communication
Quality of Service in a Service Oriented Architecture
Service Oriented Framework: A Layered Approach
Use of the
Kerrie Holley: Various Approaches Taken by Companies When Deploying SOAs
Kerrie Holley: Benefits to Customers of the
DEPLOYING A SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE
Designing a Service Oriented Architecture: Understand the Business Requirements
Designing an SOA: Mapping Business Process Issues to Technology Issues
The Use of Choreography When Developing a Service Oriented Architecture
Deploying a Service Oriented Architecture Is a Step-Wise Process
The On-Demand Operating Environment
Creating an Initial Framework for a Service Oriented Architecture
Reviewing the Service Oriented Architecture
Development Process for a Service Oriented Architecture
Case Study: How MCI Is Using Service-Oriented Architecture
THE ARCHITECTURE OF SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE
Event Modeling
Semantic Brokering
CONCLUSION
Presenter
Jason Weisser
IBM
As the Vice President for IBM Software Group's Enterprise Integration Solutions (EIS) organization, Dr. Weisser has worldwide responsibility for creating a methodology for the delivery of consistent standardized processes and procedures in the development and deployment of service oriented architecture (SOA), integration and mediation, services bus, and Web services, and manages the design, development and deployment of IBM’s SOA technology. Dr. Weisser works with customers and partners around the world and acts as a leading technical resource, helping customers achieve IBM's vision of e-business on demand (EBOD). Prior to Joining IBM, Dr. Weisser was a senior manager at Microsoft. He was actively involved in helping shape Microsoft's software-as-a-service .NET brand. He was also the head of Microsoft Consulting Services for the
Guest
Kerrie Holley
Kerrie Holley is Chief Architect for IBM Application Innovation Services, and Chief Technology Officer for IBM’s Web Services Center of Excellence. His expertise involves translating business requirements into process designs for network-centric distributed solutions. Responsibilities include technical leadership for services oriented architecture, technical oversight for network-centric software engineering projects, adaptive enterprise architecture design, leading architecture reviews, and managing technical risks. Mr. Holley was appointed an IBM Distinguished Engineer in 2000. In that same year, he was elected to the prestigious IBM Academy of Technology, comprised of 300 of IBM’s top technologists. He also received the Black Engineer of the Year Chairman’s award in 2003, which recognizes outstanding contributions in the field of engineering. Mr. Holley has a Bachelor of Art degree in Mathematics from
May 18, 2004
IBM Throws SOA Party, Invites Customers
By Clint Boulton
IBM announced new service-oriented architecture design Centers at an inaugural event in Toronto Tuesday.
SOAs (define) are models for distributed computing aimed at helping enterprise tackle the oft-dreaded dilemma of integrating disparate applications. The idea is to create a more agile, flexible environment for business processes, such as supply chain management or human resource management. They generally rely on reusable standard interfaces for integration.
Jason Weisser, vice president of Enterprise Integration at IBM, said SOAs typify IBM's strategy to move customers to e-business on-demand environments and expunge cost and complexity.
Weisser told internetnews.com that to better bridge the gap between customers and its software, IBM has opened SOA Design Centers in Austin, Texas, Beijing, Delhi and Hursley, U.K., where IBM customers can build SOAs using IBM's WebSphere products.
The news is the centerpiece of the inaugural IBM CIO Summit on SOA in Toronto this week, which the executive said is a way for IBM to work with customers on SOAs. IBM is working in the endeavor with automotive retailer Pep Boys, telco MCI, online auction eBay, and financial services firm Charles Schwab.
At the centers, customers and business partners can work through tough business problems. Work from customers and partners is then fed back into the IBM software development process to be used in future iterations of IBM products, such as WebSphere Application Server and integration software and Tivoli's infrastructure management and security software.
"Unlike other demo centers or prototype centers where someone spits out a bunch of code, these centers are actually an extension of our development labs where we build the products," Weisser said.
Weisser said work completed at the IBM SOA Design Center is different from, yet complements efforts of the IBM Global Services SOA Centers of Excellence, which use IBM Business Consulting Service to help clients in vertical industries identify business processes using an SOA.
Because crafting an SOA is such a nascent approach to marrying software integration with business processes, the race is stocked with many horses. IBM unveiled WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation last month and is looking to lead the charge.
But it is facing competition from usual rivals BEA Systems , Oracle and Microsoft , as well as a slew of smaller vendors looking to enable SOAs, including Infravio and Cape Clear.
BEA is hawking SOA portals -- and is expected to unveil a crystallized SOA strategy at its conference next week. Oracle has designed a developer kit to work with its application server.
Microsoft is busy preparing Indigo, an SOA and interoperable platform for Web services, as a major piece to its next-generation Windows operating system, Longhorn.
Research firm IDC recently said services firms' worldwide Web services-related revenue will increase exponentially in 2004 as companies continue to turn to strategic and long-term decisions around adopting standards-based SOAs. IBM wants to be at the forefront of this explosion.
But perhaps more telling of IBM's leadership position is how Weisser came to IBM. He left Microsoft to join IBM a year and a half ago because he shared more in common with Big Blue than the Redmond, Wash. company from a philosophical standpoint.
"I looked at both sides and said to myself that I really believed that IBM had figured it out and that the other company I was with really hadn't gotten to the place that I was comfortable with," Weisser said.
The executive said Microsoft and others seem to throw technology at business problems to solve them while IBM considers the business issue first, then applies technology tailored to it. This was more consistent with his mode of thinking, he said.
But even philosophical likenesses weren't enough to jumpstart SOA work until recently. For that, Weisser said progress in building Web services, grid and other standards have paved the way for more complete work in the software development space.
Web Services Security (WS-Security) is one. The Web Services Interoperability organization published a draft of the security profile today. Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is another key spec in the works to tie business processes with SOAs and Web services.
EssentialMarkets Continues to Expand Senior Management Staff
Business Editors
TACOMA, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 23
Dedicated to securing its ongoing success in the business-to-business marketplace, EssentialMarkets(TM), Inc., which enables small and medium-sized business to connect with larger companies' e-procurement systems, has added two key members to its senior management staff.
EssentialMarkets has constructed a Wall Street-caliber team with the addition of Jason Weisser, PhD., senior vice president of technology and product development, and Daniel J. Endres, vice president of global sales.
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Jason Weisser, PhD, SVP Technology and Product Development: Prior to joining EssentialMarkets, Weisser was an independent consultant to six Fortune 1000 businesses, implementing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in the healthcare industry. Weisser has also served as vice president of business development for Compass Information Services, Inc., where he directed product development and market entry, tripling corporate sales. During his professional career, Weisser has pioneered the development of numerous Internet-based products and ERP modeling that impact millions of today's end-users.
Daniel J. Endres, VP Global Sales: Endres comes to EssentialMarkets from IBM Corporation, where he served as the central regional sales manager and was one of the company's top producing hardware sales executives. Throughout his 13-year career at IBM, Endres was responsible for managing brand profitability, forecasting and the communications budget for its mobile and desktop products in the U.S. In addition, he created and implemented a comprehensive set of offerings targeted at increasing sales, profitability and customer satisfaction in Fortune 100 accounts. Endres' years of sales experience selling to F100 companies as well as channel sales, and product management experience in the high-tech industry provide a rich foundation from which to build the EssentialMarkets sales team.
Having successfully launched the company April 2000, with validation from key Fortune 1000 industry leaders as well as strong support from the industry analyst community, EssentialMarkets plans to release the beta version of its software this month with general availability in July.
About EssentialMarkets, Inc.
EssentialMarkets provides a Web-based package of services, available by monthly subscription, which enables small business suppliers to integrate with the e-procurement systems of large companies, no matter what e-procurement platform is being used. With the EssentialMarkets solution, small and medium-sized suppliers to large businesses will be able to create an online Web presence and Web-enable their product catalogs to facilitate online order, billing and shipping functions. Founded in March 2000, EssentialMarkets has teamed up with e-procurement and e-business industry leaders such as Clarus Corporation, ClickSoftware, Chicago Consulting Partners, Denali Group, DSLnetworks, eCredit.com, Microsoft, RightNow Technologies and VeriSign, to name just a few. Additional information on EssentialMarkets can be found on its Web site at www.essentialmarkets.com.
Jason Weisser
Vice President, SOA Advanced Technology, IBM Software Group
Prior to joining IBM in November, 2002, Dr. Jason Weisser held a senior management position at Microsoft and played a key role in shaping the .NET brand and related product architecture. His initial mission in IBM was focused on creating a core discipline within IBM around
the use and design for the IBM Web Services technologies. This role expanded, and in January 2004, Dr. Weisser was named VP for Enterprise Integration, under Dr. Danny Sabbah, reporting into Steve Mills, SVP of SWG. In this expanded role, Dr. Weisser and his global team of experts are responsible for working deeply with clients on complex integration solutions. In the Fall of 2006 Dr. Weisser was appointed Chief Technology Officer, SOA for all of IBM, and, working under the Organizational leadership of Robert LeBlanc, will be responsible for the continue technical innovation across IBMs diverse product and Solution offerings build on Service Oriented Architecture. Responsible for SOA Field Based Development, Dr. Weisser and his team are helping shape IBM’s strategies around SOA, Web Services and Software componentization. He continues to be very active in helping influence competitive issues concerning Microsoft and others.
About Jason Weisser: As the Vice President and CTO for IBM's Service Oriented Architecture, and the Enterprise Integration Solutions (EIS) organization, Dr. Weisser has a worldwide responsibility for creating a methodology for the delivery of consistent standardized processes and procedures in the development and deployment of SOA, Integration and mediation, and services bus, Web Services, and manages the design, development and deployment of IBM’s SOA technology.
Prior to Joining IBM, Dr. Weisser was a senior Manager at Microsoft. He was actively involved in helping shape Microsoft's software-as-a-service .NET brand. He was also the head of Microsoft Consulting Services for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. His technical work at Microsoft was directly related to Microsoft's strategic Enterprise products and distributed technologies. His team at Microsoft developed and deployed numerous end-to-end e-Business projects based on Microsoft Technologies.
In his current role at IBM, Dr. Weisser works with customers and partners around the world and acts as a leading technical resource helping customers achieve IBM's vision of e-business On Demand (EBOD). Dr. Weisser said that he was "delighted to join IBM, which is unmatched in its technological innovation, commitment to delighting customers and devotion to open standards".
Dr. Weisser obtained his PhD in computer science and behavioral psychology in 1982, specializing in AI. Dr. Weisser is based in Somers New York, IBMs corporate SWG headquarters, he and his family continue to reside in Paris France. His business interests are in the standardization and proliferation of bleeding edge technology.
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