“We expect a million developers to download SpeedStart in 2004”

Thomas P Inman, vice president of Marketing, WebSphere Infrastructure, Software Group at IBM talks to Prashant L Rao about the growing momentum of Web services technology, how WebSphere is faring vis-à-vis its primary competitor BEA WebLogic and Big Blue’s upcoming Enterprise Service Bus architecture

At what stage is Web Services adoption today?

Companies are moving from the early adopter phase to one of broader market adoption. A lot of early customers have gained considerable experience with the technology and business benefits. The technology is maturing in terms of language capability; implementers readily understand Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Security continues to be a focus area.

How does an enterprise go about assimilating Web services into its IT infrastructure?

Adoption is taking place at multiple levels.

• The most pervasive is when individual developers promote Web services. 125,000 developers have downloaded our SpeedStart Web Services kit. We expect a million in 2004.
• Sometimes, a single project or business unit uses Web services.
• There are cases where an enterprise decides that its architecture is broken and can’t be transformed. Telecom and financial services companies have all sorts of custom-coded legacy applications. In this case, the enterprise decides to adopt a new architecture focused on a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
• Lastly, an enterprise can take a process and componentise it for outsourcing using Web services.

Between them, WebSphere and WebLogic dominate the application server market. How do they stack up and where does IBM perceive its advantage vis-à-vis BEA?

In the early days BEA had some advantages such as the simplicity of their platform and being early to market. This was in the 1998 to 2000 period. We scratched our way back from 2000-2001 when they had double our market share to a situation now where we have 37 percent of the market and they have 29 percent [as per Gartner]. The market has changed from where a company looked for an application server and the tools to extend its application on to the Web to one where a company has several applications and it needs an application server to tie them together and choreograph the workflow across these applications. The goal is to put a portal on these applications, tie them with EAI, and add security and identity management.

Do Web services spell the end of the road for EAI?

EAI will continue for a while. We are seeing the evolution of EAI to incorporate Web services and the emergence of a hub and spoke backbone where you take a thing plugged into the backbone and use Web services [to connect it]. We see the two technologies as complementary.

Sun’s taken the per-employee-pricing route. Does IBM sell its software on a per-server basis or does it have a similar option?

We offer both processor and user-based pricing. The market understands processor-based pricing. User-based pricing is meant for mid-market companies with 10 to 20 users. There are a number of business models in the on-demand world and it is anybody’s guess as to what the market will look like three years from now.

Is software licensing dead?

Software licensing is evolving. We believe that it will exist a decade from now. That’s not the only way to acquire software, however.

What’s next from IBM Software?

Web services help providers understand the convergence of application servers and message queuing software. You create applications using an application server, expose it using Web services, while the message queuing takes place via a secure messaging platform. IBM is working on the Enterprise Service Bus, a platform where services are connected to the bus, which is used to route messages and transform them. The Web services-based Enterprise Service Bus will be out in 2004. The building blocks—the application server and message broker—will converge into this platform. It will let companies tie together applications and services with greater efficiency.