Flamenco points to provisioning as main Web services pain point

By Nick Patience, Special to SearchWebServices 01 May 2002 | the451

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Flamenco Networks' business model, as its website boldly proclaims, is about the implementation of Web services, rather than their creation. That is left to the numerous development tools firms and self-described Web services management software firms.

Flamenco and a few other players in the Web services networks space are relying on companies not only already having decided to use Web services to solve integration or other problems, but also being a fair way down the road to developing them.

Sales and marketing: Since the451 analyzed Flamenco Networks in its major report on the Web services market, the business climate still hasn't improved that much. But a few of the implementations the company had in the planning stage back then have become real, and it is set to announce a major paid-for pilot implementation with a firm that is one of two that dominate their industry (to an extent that mentioning the industry would reveal its identity, which the company cannot do just yet).

Put simply, it involves the transmission of status updates to its customers in real time, something that could not be achieved using a browser, which has to refresh the entire screen each time to update information. However, when the deal is announced within the next month or two, it will help Flamenco validate its credentials, better demonstrate what exactly it does and also, it believes, set it apart from some of its rivals that have had greater publicity.

Flamenco's senior vice president of sales and marketing, John Hanger, admits that the company will ultimately be judged by the number and success of its customers. It has won six since it shipped its first product seven months ago, and by the end of this year a total of between 10 and 15 would be at the high end of expectations.

Winning customers though is still a fairly slow process. That's not because the technology causes implementation headaches, but because companies are still procrastinating over whether they should take the plunge with Web services, given that only one of the core standards -- SOAP -- is really baked at this stage. And that, coupled with the economic uncertainly, can make for a long sales cycle.

But once customers decide to use Web services, Hanger claims they make a very quick decision between Flamenco and its main rival, Grand Central, which Flamenco sees in more or less every deal. That decision can be made quickly, he claims, because the two have fundamentally different models.

He casts Grand Central as like an EDI value-added network (VAN), acting as an intermediary by routing the SOAP messages to complete Web services transactions. Flamenco, on the other hand sees itself as a more of an invisible presence, much like Akamai.

Technology: The main architectural difference between the two is that Grand Central is a central hub, handling authentication of users and routing of messages, while Flamenco uses its central server only for initial provisioning, and then the trading partners communicate using edge caches in a peer-to-peer architecture.

Aside from the plumbing distinctions between the two -- there are other companies such as Digital Evolution and Stele, which are closer to Flamenco in terms of architecture than Grand Central but at earlier stages of their development -- Flamenco sees its principal differentiator as the provisioning of users and Web services.

Provisioning in this context means the steps to make a connection between a requester's application and a provider's Web service -- or the other way around. But whichever way, it requires the cooperation of both parties. A manual process could work for a handful of connections, but when the numbers run into hundreds and beyond, some automation obviously has to be introduced.

Flamenco has a self-service Web application for users to set parameters such as encryption, transport protocols and service-level agreements. It can be automated to cope with prequalified communities or managed on a publish-and-subscribe basis. The data is stored on the central server, which enables the parameters to be maintained separately from the code of the Web service itself or the message structure. If it were included in either of those, then it would make the Web services network difficult to scale.

Flamenco uses its edge proxies, which contain a copy of the connection information also stored on the server, to intercept and deliver the messages to the correct end points. This hybrid approach combines the benefits of a central repository of interconnection information with the speed of a local cache, according to Flamenco.

Finance: Flamenco is just starting on its series B round of funding in a friendly climate for Web services companies to raise money, judging by the successful rounds closed by Altoweb, Grand Central and Systinet. It is looking for between $5 and $10 million, and it hopes to close the round by July.

Conclusion: Flamenco may not have the profile and influential friends that Grand Central enjoys, but it has some patent-pending technology that it believes will help keep the likes of IBM and EDS out of its business for some time to come. It has an OEM strategy and is talking to various companies about licensing its software.

One or more of the Java application server folks would make sense, as would the content delivery networks, since they strive to speed the delivery of something more valuable than content. The new money and the high-profile customers coming down the line should help elevate Flamenco's message to the level of Grand Central's, if that is what it wants to do.

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