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Automotive giant DaimlerChrysler cites "technology leadership" as one of its four strategic pillars. It is fitting, therefore, that it is now embarking on an implementation in one of the most cutting edge areas of IT: the service-oriented architecture (SOA).

With around 375,000 employees spread across 55 major operational plants around the world, internal communications is the first area where DaimlerChrysler began to use web services, with an application to gather information from a database and deliver it to users via a consistent, secure interface. In one instance, the technology was used to allow employees to check their benefits over the intranet.

Although this proved successful, it was merely the first step in a much broader project. "We wanted to have experience of it internally first, to see how it works and to see what the benefits and problems are," says Hans-Juergen Gross, manager of methods, technologies and services at DaimlerChrysler. "The end goal is to connect to suppliers or other companies to exchange data based on web services."

Three years ago, DaimlerChrysler developed a web portal for its suppliers with IBM WebSphere. Over 15,000 individuals from 7000 partner companies now use the portal, which makes applications such as Lotus Notes and SAP, used by several business units, available to users across the Internet.

The success of this prompted IBM to suggest the more ambitious SOA project. Bolstered by enthusiasm from both the IT department and technologically-minded strategic business units, the internal system is now to be tested externally.

"In future we will have more opportunity to change our business processes because web services and SOA is able to do that faster than in the past," says Gross.

Giving web services based access to partners and users across the Internet, however, raises new issues. Security is a particular concern, as is the scale required to take the technology to so many more people. "The whole situation is more complex. This may have an impact on the technology we have to choose," says Gross. Because the web services need to be adapted to fit an entire organisation, extensive testing for proof of concept is important and DaimlerChrysler is particularly thorough in this.

Gross also says there are some issues with the underlying technical standards that need to be resolved. Tony Fricko of IBM's emerging technology division, who worked with DaimlerChrysler on the initial stages of project, admits that "the standards agreements don't go far enough", referring, for example, to industry specific variants of XML documents. But, he says, this is increasingly something that needs to be solved by the industry using these services, rather than IT vendors.

With DaimlerChrysler's rivals working on similar projects, Gross feels web services technology is crucial to maintaining a competitive advantage. Additionally, an IT department's life can me made easier by WSDL (web services development language) tools which allow 30 parameters to be prepared and coded with just a few clicks. This automatic code generation means less work and fewer errors.