Information Age: News, analysis & insight for IT & business leaders

If one listens to its proponents, time could be running out for agent technology to deliver major business benefits. "Agent technology is on a knife edge and what happens over the next 12 months will determine whether it becomes mainstream or just another technology that disappears," says Tom Ilube, CEO of Lost Wax, the UK-based supplier of agent infrastructure software for online trading hubs.

This may be a dramatic comment from the CEO of a company that has staked its future on agent technology. But the reality is that it could, in fact, have been said by any watcher of this specialist area of software since the mid-1990s as adoption by organisations other than universities and software vendor research laboratories has remained latent.

During the past half decade, a slew of software vendors have put agents to use in their core commercial applications. These range from consumer and corporate buyer 'shopbots', which comb web sites for data such as product prices, through to network and systems management agents that are employed to send back alerts about the performance of devices such as routers and switches. However, there is a big difference between those uses and the kind of widespread deployment of agents by businesses that was once predicted.

The game is not yet over for agents, but what their advocates argue is that, to become a significant technology, agents will probably have to hitch a ride on other emerging technologies that are widely supported by the IT industry.

Catalytic conversion
The chief catalyst here could be web services – the new applications approach that involves the construction of applications from components, data and services that are 'discovered' and executed over the Internet. Agents running on top of a web services infrastructure could perform a vital task by carrying out autonomous decision-making activities in a dynamically changing environment, says Stefan Brantschen, VP of business development at Whitestein Technologies, a early-stage Switzerland-based supplier of agent software.

For example, someone could send a request over the Internet to find a web service for trading shares. When multiple offers come back, software agents – and not the person – could decide which is the best service.

Agents would also benefit from being associated with the robust web services standards that are supported by major software and hardware vendors including Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. These standards include the extensible mark-up language (XML), the web services description language (WSDL), and the universal description, discovery and integration (UDDI) initiative. "The agent community really needs to plug into where the web services vendors are going," says Ilube at Lost Wax.

Alongside that, a set of common methodologies are required to help software developers – en masse – to build agent-based applications more easily, says Andrew Lucas, managing director at Agent Oriented Software (AOS), a privately held supplier of agent software platforms for large organisations. This could go a long way to bring large technology vendors on board, he adds.

Fresh methods
As a model, Lucas looks to the success of application design software specialist Rational Software that pioneered the methodology and specifications for the unified mark-up language (UML). UML has become the de facto standard for model-driven application development. "What [the agent community] needs is a set of methodologies that would enable systems integrators to take AOS's software, for example, and build a useful outcome for themselves," says Lucas.

Michael Luck, director of AgentLink, a European Commission-funded organisation focused on agent technology research, concurs. "For example, [German business application software giant] SAP would not build [agent-based] systems without methodologies and a very structured way of doing so. They would be too scared to."

Despite its highlighted weaknesses, the deployment of agents is growing, particularly among organisations focused on manufacturing, transportation and logistics. To a lesser extent, they are also finding their way into private trading exchanges. Lost Wax, for example, currently has several private exchange customers deploying its agent technology, including the Baltic Exchange, an online shipping and cargo market centred in London.

Looking to the future, a participant company in the Baltic Exchange could invoke the software agents of Lost Wax's e-Commerce Platform to carry out autonomous contract negotiations concerning price or volume with cargo suppliers, says Ilube.

But as the case for agent software builds, "vendors of agent technology (AT) need to learn a new language and start talking about AT in ways that business people understand [as opposed to technical jargon]," says Ilube.

That mature approach and its role in web services may decide whether agent technology still has a mainstream future in – and past – 2003.