A recent Accenture survey ("Web Services: IT Efficiency Today...Powerful Business Solutions Tomorrow," January 2003) revealed that most C-level executives expect standards-based technology to deliver on the promise of Web services - and only 16% think Web services are "cutting edge" technology. So it would appear Web services are moving beyond pure hype and into mainstream enterprises.

"Good news," say IT pros, "but what's to be done while Web services standards are still in development?"

In fact, we don't have to wait for all the standards to start taking advantage of them. We simply have to be creative until they are finalized. Even as protocols evolve, innovative thinking and inventive use of tools can fill the void and produce alternatives to fulfill customers' business and technology needs using Web services technology available today. Here are a number of creative alternatives.

Security and validation services will be ubiquitous when Web services become widespread. In the meantime, a Web services gateway can be built today to perform authentication, validation, transformation, and exception handling for Web service-based solutions.

This was our approach for a federal unemployment agency that works in coordination with other government entities. A mainframe had previously handled all navigation and business logic processing in response to job-seekers' online queries. The agency sought to improve service by allowing more access to information, centralizing responsibility for data and related processes, and creating a foundation for expansion.

Rather than wait until all the necessary products were available as open, standards-based components, we recommended using those that were available, and reusing or rewriting legacy technology and applications for which solutions were not yet available.

In this case, the customer retained the mainframe database and chose the Microsoft .NET development platform for Web services-based integration and security. We built a Web services gateway to provide security and validation services on the edge of the enterprise, implementing Web services standards externally, while reusing the existing mainframe internally. This provided a solid, flexible foundation for interaction with internal and external audiences and systems.

Another interim approach is to provide new enterprise service aggregations to mask underlying complexity. This model exposes Web service interfaces internally for many consumers of a common domain of information. For example, mandating use of a single central CRM package might be too disruptive for companies that already have legacy customer management systems in production. A CRM Web services layer presenting a single interface to both old and new systems could smooth over complexity, as well as extend an application's lifetime utility and extract greater value from all of them.

Building gateways and services for aggregation are just two ways to implement Web services using existing protocols, even as additional standards evolve. Companies also may consider using products that provide alternatives to nonexistent standards. Major platform vendors will likely ensure users a migration path as standards evolve, too.

For example, Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 is earning early praise for management and consumption of Web services and business process integration. Based on Web service standards XSD, the product will support using SOAP, WSDL, and BPEL. The business services in BizTalk Server 2004 and many other traditional EAI tools can perform process coordination, routing, reliable messaging, and more, in place of the standards while they evolve. By exposing Web service interfaces externally, and implementing the functional equivalent behind the scenes with another product, you can take advantage of current standards and implement new ones without inconveniencing customers.

As Gartner analysts Roy Schulte and Yefim Natis point out in "Most Composite Applications Will Need an Integration Layer" (April 2003), mismatched technology and mismatched information are primary obstacles to the Web services ideal.

The analysts propose that an ESB combine Web services, messaging middleware, intelligent routing, and transformation to serve as a lightweight, ubiquitous integration backbone. A Web service would make a request to the ESB layer, which would engage with multiple systems and respond.

Even ESBs are not a silver bullet; software vendors still need to expose their products as Web services. But ESBs are a valuable model, and existing elements in the IT environment can supply ESB functions such as message queuing and workflow management. Add a Web services gateway for validation, authentication, transformation, and exception handling, and you've got a creative solution to many business problems today.

If there is reason to act now, creative thinking can produce solutions that fill the void while the technology industry agrees on and implements standards. IT professionals should weigh the needs of the business and assess whether they can afford to wait for standards to implement Web services or proceed now to reap some of the benefits immediately.