New Directions for Processes

Web services, the hot buzz phrase at the turn of the millennium, could change
the way people think about exposing their business applications. The execution
and monitoring of repeatable business processes, which are defined by a set of
formal procedures, over Web-based services backbones, could become the key to
delivering knowledge-driven process management or BPM (Business Process
Management).

"Web services are getting primed to play a very important role in BPM
today, as extended team partners and customers are scattered across the
globe," says Frank Sgammotta, sales development director (Asia-Pacific),
Autodesk.

Besides, as protocols and intero—perability standards diversify, and remote
access technology and secure access gain importance, it is imminent to access
business processes efficiently from remote locations.

"Given the circumstances and the dynamics of the current business
ecosystem, it is necessary for partners and associates to be able to collaborate
and share the most up-to-date information in real time," Sgammotta notes.

Worldwide, Web services were initially successful in private environments
where large enterprises needed to exchange data with their divisions and
subsidiaries or with partners and clients. In such controlled situations,
agreement on the data being passed between Web service components is more easily
obtained. In addition, since Web services use open integration standards,
vendors like IBM and BEA can supply customers with client side software to add
to their applications, no matter what the platform.

Web services can facilitate the sharing of the most up-to-date data in real
time, reducing expenses in terms of travel and shipping and significantly
reducing time to market. "Customers will receive responses in a much
quicker time period while simultaneously saving on costs of transport, shipping
and communication," adds Sgammotta.

Aside from the hoopla, the IT industry is reluctant to segmentise or estimate
the size of the fragmented Web services market in India. However, it feels that
a certain critical mass will help companies leverage their Web services
interfaces against their BPM apps implementations and customer-facing
interfaces. Managing key data and optimizing cross-function business processes
will be part of the Web services-BPM roadmap, say industry sources.

Web services enable software components to interact with each other around
the world. In the past, this was only occasionally realized within private
networks using the industry standard CORBA (Common Object Request Broker
Architecture) and Microsoft’s COM and DCOM distributed component platforms.
However, Web services today, use XML and Expanded XML or eXML-based protocols
that are lightweight and simpler, and thus stand a better chance of being widely
implemented with BPM applications.

Business-Oriented Architectures

Web services still require cooperation and agreement among people to define
business transactions and processes. Web services standards only define the
format and transport architectures, but the meaning of each element of data
exchanged also has to be defined ahead of time by industry consensus.

Take the case of ebXML (Electronic Business XML). This XML-based set of
definitions for electronic transactions and business collaboration is based on
work done by the United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic
Business (UN/CEFACT). ebXML provides descriptors for modeling business processes
that includes the definition of software components. It is designed for global
interoperability and to facilitate the transition from older electronic data
interchange (EDI) formats to the Internet. While standards like ebXML have been
defined and primed to go mainstream on the Internet well in advance, the growth
of the overall Web-based services market can fuel the growth of BPM suites by
streamlining processes and increasing transaction efficiencies.

The entire Web services protocol stack comprises important emerging standards
for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) interfaces. With interest growing in
service-oriented architectures, companies that supply infrastructure software,
such as IBM, BEA, Oracle and Microsoft, are seeking to provide the tools to
build business services-oriented architectures. BEA will later this year launch
Project Sierra to promote the use of its infrastructure software for
services-oriented architectures.

SOAs were based on the principle of being able to link distributed
architectures and communicate across different platforms. The concept of SOA was
to create loosely coupled Web services that could be consumed in processes or
other Web services and arranged to deliver end-to-end business process. SOA is
differentiated from other component architectures by "loosely
coupling" component services. This approach isolates the service consumers
from the service providers to deliver flexibility and agility.

"Most loose coupling approaches depend on message-based service
interfaces. Using a message-based approach allows services to add optional new
data elements to the interface without effecting an existing service
consumers," says Manish Sharma, Integration Solutions business director
(Asia-Pacific region), BEA.

Web-Ready for the Enterprise

Evolving from its CORBA/COM/DCOM origins, Web services now run on a plethora
of communications standards – like Web-based applications, which dynamically
interact with other Web applications using open standards that include XML
(Extensible Markup Language), UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and
Integration) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). Such applications
typically run behind the scenes, one program "talking to" another
(server to server). Microsoft’s .NET and Sun’s Sun ONE (J2EE) are still the
major development platforms that natively support these standards.

"SOA has the potential to make applications more agile if the services
are properly designed for reuse," explains Sharma. "Reusable services
save developers significant time by delivering significant business function in
a general form. Designing reusable services is a best practice similar to
database design or universal data modeling. Since service design is a key
success factor, SOA adopters should find a suitable approach for managing the
service design process."

Besides, factoring reusable Web services into the SOA framework can save
costs in development and management. The dynamic bindings of a directory such as
UDDI will help the consumer cope with business or technological changes at the
service provider’s end and position his BPM apps accordingly.

Unforgettable Taste of Java

From the beginning, Sun Microsystem’s Java technology has been a leading
Web services platform because of innovative vendors and open source projects
built on Java technology. Web services on their present growth trajectory
represent the latest wave in distributed computing and perhaps the most
important innovation since the introduction of Java in 1995 and Microsoft’s
XML in 1998.

Sun Microsystems emerged as a pioneer in this space by charting a clear
roadmap for its Web services offerings and the role of Java in making it a
reality. "For us, Java is still the way to go and the standards fine-tuned
on J2EE and its components like Enterprise Java Beans and Java servlets are part
and parcel of any Web services platform," says Vijay Anand, MD of Sun’s
India Engineering Center.

Web services give BPM the potential to create nimble processes and
applications by capturing events from a variety of sources and presenting them
with a consistent interface. But customer-facing Web services are still
perceived with caution.

At the end of the day, the Web service design is as important as
functionality. Implementation roadmaps should lay stress on identifying those
processes that can deliver real benefits from automation and execute plans based
around the merits of process automation.

"Ideally, building BPM solutions that leverage Web services requires
neither luck nor a stroke of genius, but rather is the result of methodical
approaches," says Sun Microsystems distinguished engineer and Java pioneer
Mark Hapner.

MOM Sees Your Data Through Messaging-Oriented Middleware (MOM) and e-mail messaging systems provide similar transport functionality. The primary difference is that messaging middleware deals with transactions between programs, whereas e-mail messaging deals with memos between people. Messaging middleware provides a hub and spoke architecture that serves as a central point of communication between all business applications. Without a messaging system, each application must be custom-programmed to call the other and ensure that the data arrives. Once an enterprise conforms to a common messaging interface, future connections between applications are more easily developed, and the message queue can hold transactions that are currently not deliverable due to system or network failure or overload.

The Aberdeen Group expects worldwide spending in BPM to increase to $6.32
billion by 2005 from $2.26 billion during 2001. The market for BPM solutions in
the Asia-Pacific region is expected to grow from 20.7% in 2003 to 36.1% in 2005.

The Web services tiers could get more complex as more transactions between
business partners go on the public Internet. While basic Web services can run
well on app servers, more advanced scenarios will require intelligent XML
networks and collaboration in real time under a centralized leadership, which
would result in the successful implementation of business processes over the
Web. The most prominent champions of the Web services market–IBM, Microsoft
and Sun– have their work cut out.

Ravi Menon in Bangalore