Deconstructing 'on-demand': Experts outline link to Web services

By Eric B. Parizo, News Editor 12 Mar 2003 | SearchWebServices.com

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Is it marketing hype or the future of enterprise computing? IBM Corp.'s e-business on-demand program has received a fair amount of attention recently but, to date, the esoteric concept has left Web services professionals wondering how the approach will affect them in the months and years to come.

IBM has touted on-demand as a service that delivers computing power like a utility company delivers electricity, and as a new paradigm for building integrated enterprise computing networks.

Last fall, IBM CEO Sam Palmisano publicly introduced on-demand as an IT infrastructure concept that enables an enterprise to quickly react to new business opportunities. Palmisano emphasized concepts such as open standards, grid computing and autonomics, but to a large extent he left the industry wondering how IBM would usher those ideals into today's chaotic, multi-platform environments.

Some have downplayed on-demand's significance by calling it merely an IT services offering in disguise, but Stefan Van Overtveldt, IBM's director of WebSphere technical marketing, said it's as much about principles as it is about products and services.

"When we refer to on-demand, from an IT perspective, you should look at it as a set of capabilities that span multiple levels," Van Overtveldt said, such as providing access to applications as dynamic services, making applications easier to create and change on the fly, and quickly boosting or reallocating computing power when needed.

Mike Gilpin, a research fellow with Cambridge, Mass., research firm Giga Information Group Inc., said on-demand is more than a marketing ploy. He said IBM's vagueness is "a natural reflection of the embryonic development state of the suite of technologies under the on-demand umbrella. It's not a single offering; it's a marketing [program] that has a number of initiatives that exist individually, or have loose connections."

Of course, few would be surprised to learn that IBM's WebSphere product line is at the heart of on-demand. Van Overtveldt said WebSphere Application Server Enterprise serves as the operating system for an on-demand environment, and WebSphere Portal acts as an access conduit to application functionality that's provided by IBM's other software brands: Lotus, Tivoli, DB2 and Rational.

IBM may or may not be touting the benefits of on-demand computing primarily to sell more software, but Gilpin said the business case for on-demand isn't strong enough to get companies to abandon existing software that still works reasonably well. However, as companies enter their natural upgrade cycles, he said, they may be more likely to implement IBM software in order to realize the promises of on-demand.

The Web services connection

IBM views Web services as the foundation of on-demand computing, said Dwight Davis, vice president with analyst firm Summit Strategies Inc. in Boston.

"You don't get to the point of having a computing model like this unless you have open standards on which to build that infrastructure," which Web services provide, Davis said. He said IBM realizes that the Web services end game is all about supporting high-level application functionality.

Van Overtveldt said Web services eventually will become the primary provisioning method for on-demand application services. In fact, he said, IBM is working on a complete Web services provisioning framework, code-named Allegro, which it plans to release later this year as a WebSphere Application Server add-on.

As an example, Van Overtveldt described how a bank might use Web services in an on-demand environment to build a new online loan application. Rather than coding the application to work monolithically, it might use a Web service to draw authentication information from an existing customer database. Then it would pass information securely back and forth from an external credit bureau using a common Web services security standard.

Next, another Web service would alert a loan officer to approve the loan request. Finally, one more Web service would interface with an accounting application to reserve the balance of the loan.

Van Overtveldt said that when more advanced standards are finalized, a change to a business rule in on-demand will mean modifying a Web service instead of redesigning an entire application. The result will be greater flexibility at lower cost.

Risks and challenges

Davis said IBM's on-demand strategy represents forward thinking, and it will allow the company to maintain its Web services leadership position in the industry, a position it shares with Microsoft Corp. But he said the strategy is not without risk, because it hinges upon universal acceptance and adoption of standards such as SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. The strategy also depends on the development of complex security, choreography and business-process flow standards. These events are far from sure things.

Gilpin said the appeal of on-demand is currently limited to certain verticals, such as travel services, financial services and retail companies, because they have the most incentive to adopt IBM's technology today. IBM's challenge, he said, will be building a compelling business case for on-demand among a broader range of customers.

Gilpin also said that IBM will face resistance extolling its vision because most technologist have come to define Web services as a method for integrating internal applications, not for building brand new external ones.

But whether it ultimately succeeds or fails, Gilpin said, the industry will benefit from the ideology IBM is creating.

"If we look back a few years from now, we'll find that not all of our expectations were fulfilled, but a number of generally useful things will have emerged," he said. "Enterprises want more flexible ways of using and paying for distributed resources."

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

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