IBM-Microsoft axis driving Web services standards

By Nick Patience, Special to SearchWebServices 08 Mar 2002 | the451

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IBM feels that some other companies -- most notably BEA and Sun -- have been hogging a bit too much of the Web services limelight lately, and it wants the world to know that in its opinion they are Johnny-come-latelies to the space.

In fact, the only company with which IBM favorably compares its Web services work is Microsoft. The unofficial IBM-Microsoft axis dominates much of IBM's thinking -- and not just about Web services standards.

Context: The unlikely tryst began in the end of 1999, when IBM began telling anyone who would listen that it wanted the "Sun taken out of Java." Having done much of the donkeywork on Java, most notably the work that led to Java 2 Enterprise Edition, IBM felt at the time that Sun should back off a little from its heavy-handedness -- after all, it had IBM's long-term commitment to Java already, both in terms of a license and its work in the Java Community Process (JCP).

Then in December 1999, IBM and Microsoft published the 1.0 specification of SOAP, and the pair have remained "co-opetition" partners ever since.

WS-I: As the451 has said before, IBM is playing both ends -- Microsoft and Sun -- off each other, and quite successfully, it seems. Having secured a strong set of Java tools and by some counts the market-leading J2EE application server, it is reaching out to Microsoft while simultaneously doing what it can to marginalize Sun.

The most recent example was the establishment of the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), to which Sun got a last-minute, half-baked invite. But other examples include the GRID computing initiative, on which IBM stole Sun's thunder, and IBM's release of its Eclipse meta development environment, which cast shadows over Sun's similar NetBeans initiative. IBMers claim Sun knew about Eclipse some five months prior to its November 2001 announcement, and its logs recorded numerous logons with the Sun passwords, but it still decided to go its own way with NetBeans.

IBM executives gathered at its Somers campus in upstate New York this week to talk about Web services were more than willing to discuss the unofficial understanding with Microsoft. Scott Hebner, IBM's director of marketing for e-business technologies -- ostensibly WebSphere -- said it was borne out of a desire to not see J2EE as the entire software platform, but rather as an important part of something wider that must by necessity embrace the Microsoft-controlled desktop.

Sun would probably argue that it too can embrace the desktop via the browser. But, just in case, it hedged its bets and offers StarOffice for free to try to undercut Microsoft's Office desktop monopoly. IBM has de-emphasized Lotus SmartSuite and long ago gave up on OS/2 as an alternative to Windows on the desktop, but competes with Microsoft on tools, applications servers and operating systems - most notably with Linux. And that's the way it should be, claims IBM.

BEA and Oracle: As for BEA and Oracle, well they are just the other two points in a bizarre love triangle, according to IBM. And, just as we always hurt the ones we love, they will end up cannibalizing each other's business, according Bob Sutor, IBM's director of e-business standards strategy.

Both companies are founding members of the WS-I, which holds its first board meeting this week and first public meeting within a few weeks. But WS-I is not where the real Web services standards work will get done -- it's just an integrator of existing standards that IBM, Microsoft and others will bring to the table.

Java and Web services: Sun is busy trying to equate Java with Web services, and the fact that the majority of Web services application work until now has been done in Java backs it up to some extent. But now that Microsoft's Visual Studio.Net is generally available, that might start to change, and Sun needs to make up its mind fast about its standards contribution -- and in a more dignified manner than its recent partial embrace of Linux.

Java is indeed important for Web services, but the main point of Web services is integrating distributed applications of all types, regardless of the language in which they were written or the software platforms on which they run. And, anyway, BEA and IBM control the market for J2EE application servers, not Sun -- even Oracle looks to have a better chance of reeling them in than Sun does at present.

Conclusion: The fact is that IBM and Microsoft instigated the Web services standards push, and Sun missed out. And no amount of scare tactics from Sun about IBM wielding patents on some of the technologies it's throwing into the standards mix is going to make headway with the rest of the software industry, which also knows by now what they are taking on when they trust standards to Microsoft (and they seem willing to go along). So we must assume that there is work going on behind the scenes at Sun to present a coherent Web services message with some substantive standards contributions.

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