So, people keep asking me, "Steve, how come you are such a wild and crazy guy?"

OK, sorry, a late 70s flashback there.

No, they ask me, "Steve, what's your take on Web Services?" To that, I have a standard opening:

1. There is nothing special about Web Services.
2. Web Services will change the world.

1. Web Services? No thanks, I already have enough contractors.
2. Web Services is revolutionary. Are you ready to unleash a force of unstoppable economic power from your tiny little laptop?
3. Oh, Web Services, it's yet another RPC mechanism. It's middleware. Big Deal.

There is nothing special about Web Services
Technically speaking, Web Services and the SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI specifications aren't really earth shattering. Haven't we visited this all before? Wasn't it called CORBA and IDL? Doesn't CORBA have location independence? So now it's just using XML...big woo. Oh yeah, CORBA had security and transactions as well and today Web Services doesn't.

And on a purely technical level, this is correct. Web Services, as a technology, is just an RPC mechanism that uses XML over HTTP using a UDDI registry for service lookup. (OK you purists, I know it doesn't have to be HTTP and it doesn't have to be UDDI.) I don't know if you remember CORBA in the early 90s? Well, CORBA was supposed to open up this gateway for everything to be able to talk to everything. And you know what? On a technical level, it would work. Except for the fact that at the time we were pre-Internet, pre-HTTP, pre-firewall (ok...kind of), pre-XML, and pre-eBusiness. Oh, it also didn't help that only seven people on the entire planet knew how to fully implement this stuff.

This leads us to the next statement.

Web Services will change the world
Today we're wired; we've got protocols that we all agree upon; we're used to communicating to servers inside other organizations; everyone on the planet has a Web server or an app server; we're using XML for more and more; and we're in love with eBusiness. So the combination of these technologies and the forces driving eBusiness leads us to this second conclusion.

We weren't ready for the promise of CORBA because it required too much to be in place. So Web Services really delivers on the promise of CORBA.

Because of the successes in both competitive advantage and profits that eBusiness has brought, the pressures are on to do more and more. And the focus isn't on the first-mover advantage that had corporations running scared because of the dot-coms; now it's on what we refer to as the right-mover advantage. That is, doing the right things in IT for the business-not just the things that get the fastest payback.

Gartner Group says 80 percent of core mission-critical systems inside organizations are isolated from the net. They also say that in the next few years these legacy systems will be extended to the Web and that the primary mechanism to do so will be Web Services.

So the reason that Web Services will change the world is that it opens up new ways to get core business processes out of their proprietary shells and available for calling by a variety of users, the first being developers inside the same organization. If Web Services did nothing more than provide a standard way to extend the life and increase the availability of existing functionality it would do wonders. What Web Services says to an organization is that regardless of which platform a department chooses, they can be assured that the functions are available and shareable with other departments. (Those of you on IT Standards Committees should disregard that little statement about different departments using different platforms; we know that would never happen.)

Today when two companies int-egrate their systems for some purpose, it tends to be a one-off solution-a custom integration. So if you want to integrate with multiple business partners you'll have to write a lot of code. Web Services helps get by that problem and calls on developers and business people to think about generalizing those services and turning them into repeatable (and resalable?) business processes. Web Services ena-bles IT to reduce costs through compo-nentized business processes, increased interoperability, and reuse of existing legacy systems. It also enables business to seek out new ways of working with business partners to reduce cost or increase revenue. It may take a while for IT to embrace all of this, but saving and making more money is something businesses always embrace.