WS-I meets; Sun mulls its options

By Nick Patience, Special to SearchWebServices 19 Apr 2002 | the451

Digg This!     StumbleUpon     Del.icio.us

The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) held its inaugural meeting over two days in San Francisco this week. It was attended by representatives of more than 100 member companies - the ranks of the WS-I having recently been officially swollen by about 50 new members. But Sun Microsystems still is not one of them.

Context: The WS-I is a meta-standards body initiated by IBM and Microsoft in February. Seven other founding companies joined to form a nine-member board: Accenture, BEA Systems, Fujitsu, HP, Intel, Oracle and SAP. It has a remit to develop interoperability guidelines, reference designs and test material for standards that are already ratified or in the process of being ratified by standards bodies.

Working Groups The main thing to emerge from this week's meeting was the names, chairs and remits of the three working groups. Keith Ballinger of Microsoft heads the Basic Profile working group, Fujitsu's Jacques Durand heads the Test Materials and Tools Development working group, while the Sample Applications group is chaired by Anthony Roby of Accenture and Sinisa Zimek of SAP. The aim is to present the first set of deliverables from all three groups in a single bundle sometime in the fall.

The Basic Profile working group will be the first to get its work done, as the other two depend on it. Its aim is simply to agree on the core set of standards (including XML Schema, SOAP, SDL and UDDI) and to clarify the existing standards in order to smooth over differences in interpretations.

The Sample Applications working group has a self-explanatory name, but probably the most interesting job - to use commercial development tools to produce applications that run across multiple platforms.

WS-I vice chair Norbert Mikula, who works for Intel, confirmed that the two major platforms that will be tried will be Java and .NET. The third working group will produce the test materials, so that members and outsiders who signed an agreement can test their applications and tools for compatibility.

Sun's position: Meanwhile, Sun is awaiting a reply to an email it sent back in February asking to join as a board member. Shortly after that, the WS-I board met and decided not to change the format of the board - that is, not to expand it to accommodate Sun or some of the 16 or so other firms that apparently wanted to be on the board - and so Sun is still waiting for a reply.

Not all of those 16 or so have apparently joined as regular members, and Sun has no intention of doing so, for now. It believes it is currently in a strong enough position within the market, having developed the dominant Web services development language - Java - and plans to hold out at least until it gets a reply to its inquiry.

The WS-I says it is not up to the organization to ask people to join the organization - they have to come to it. Which of course Sun did, only it wasn't simply requesting an application form, it wanted a seat at the top table. Sun says it would be doing its customers a disservice to attempt to work as a regular member, rather than as a leader of the WS-I.

Sun of course realizes that there comes a point where staying outside the tent becomes counter-productive, but Simon Phipps, Sun's chief technology evangelist, says its board-level application is "not a done deal." He does not believe Sun has done itself any more damage being outside the organization than if it had caved in and joined the rank and file already.

How long this will go on for is anybody's guess. Sun, however, has been sowing seeds of patent-related doubt in the industry as to IBM and Microsoft's true motivations behind forming a new standards - or meta-standards - body, rather than using an established one such as the W3C or OASIS. There has been a lot of discussion over the past few months about permitting reasonable and nondiscriminatory (RAND) licenses to cover technology used in the creation and implementation of standards, rather than royalty-free licenses. Sun believes IBM and Microsoft, which have a patent cross-license agreement with each other, are trying to create a "safe haven for RAND."

Conclusion: If IBM and Microsoft's intention is to marginalize Sun, then they have been fairly effective, in that they have created a body over which they have considerable influence and have persuaded almost every other major technology vendor to join.

Sun to some extent still controls the Java Community Process, which features about 40 additional vendors, but while it may have sown the Java seed, others such as IBM and BEA have arguably benefited considerably more than Sun. At some point in the near future it will probably have to swallow its pride and get inside the WS-I tent to try to influence its direction.

the451 is an analyst firm that provides timely, detailed and independent analysis of news in technology, communications and media. To evaluate the service, click here.

Tags: WS-I,  VIEW ALL TAGS

Digg This!     StumbleUpon     Del.icio.us

RELATED CONTENT WS-I Boubez: SOA virtualization, SLAs and access control policy RESTful Web 2.0 overtaking SOAP? The standards behind Web services WS02 releases Web services app server Where SOA standards matter: The SAP view Alcatel-Lucent joins WS-I WS-I seeks feedback on working drafts WS-I focusing on making Web services enterprise-class WS-Inspection: Discovering Web services WS-I releases document identifying security threats

RELATED RESOURCES 2020software.com, trial software downloads for accounting software, ERP software, CRM software and business software systems Search Bitpipe.com for the latest white papers and business webcasts Whatis.com, the online computer dictionary