The missing link
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Web services will really shine when deployed outside an enterprise. But as yet there is no robust infrastructure to test, monitor, and manage the performance of dynamic B2B web services.
For IT organisations of all sizes, the emerging technology of web services is already proving itself a flexible and inexpensive means of integrating and deploying applications.
The initial adoption has been almost exclusively for in-house projects, making earlier predictions that web services would be the underpinning mechanism for flexible B2B interaction look exaggerated.
But unlike with many previous technologies, the shift to that new software development and deployment model, in which applications are constructed by the binding together of discrete components discovered and executed over the network, is not being held back by any lack of underlying standards. For once, the key design protocols are in place before the technology is being rolled out. There are also plenty of tools from software development that can be used for internal web services application development and deployment.
Rather, the barrier that stands in the way of the wider adoption of web services for applications that extend beyond the corporate firewall lies with the lack of application performance management software for testing, monitoring, and managing the web services infrastructure.
Indeed, there are plenty of applications organisations simply cannot build without the evolution of that management environment. A typical example might be an online holiday booking application, where the user can book a holiday, flights, car rental,
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The problem is that the traditional model for application performance management breaks down with B2B web services applications. When an application is a combination of in-house code and bound-in modules from multiple third-party sources, testing and verifying the application becomes highly complex. In fact, today there are no readily available tools that will even monitor and report when a web service from an ad hoc business partner has failed.
The upshot is that any organisation seeking to set up a B2B or B2C application based on distributed web services will find it difficult to define, let alone guarantee, any kind of service level with users or partners.
Delivery not guaranteed
The main problem with web services that work outside of an enterprise is that the provider of the service has no insight into the execution process. "Management of distributed systems is difficult because you need to know what is happening between each component. This is more difficult with external web services because the implementation of the service is hidden from the developer," says Gareth Johnson, an analyst at market leader Ovum.
This was exactly the problem faced by Simon Harris, founder of Develop4, who has designed a series of web services for LevelSeas, a UK-based shipping industry B2B exchange. When Harris deployed the exchange's first web service, designed to synchronise the contact information of member companies with the exchange's central database, it only worked with half of the users.
But without any method of monitoring these web services, Harris had to rely on the users to report faults. In this case it was a month before all the problems were discovered, and another week until Harris was able to diagnose the faults.
Harris's experiences provide a good example of the range of challenges that web services deployments face. The problems with the deployment were not due to bad design of the web service, but because Harris could not determine how the web service would be delivered to and used by the customer.
"There is a logical endpoint to a web service, but what you do not see is how many filters and firewalls it has to go through before it gets to the user," says Harris. "The problem was that some firewalls and ISPs were not configured to accept [the main web services protocols], and some customers used several different ISPs, or rerouted their transmissions all over the place."
It's in the process
The LevelSeas example highlights the fact that it is not the web service per se that is the cause for failure of web services applications deployed outside the enterprise. Indeed, developers can already ensure the performance of their in-house web services components with a range of performance and functionality testing tools available from start-ups such as Empirix, Parasoft, and RedGate, as well as from established testing vendors such as Segue and Mercury Interactive.
Despite these tools, "there is clearly no guarantee that web services will work when deployed," says Harris.
The real challenge for external web services projects is to manage dynamic web services components on the Internet. This may require a completely new approach to application deployment and management, which combines a business manager's understanding of the business process with the IT developer's ability to diagnose and fix bugs in the system.
Web services analysts such as Jason Bloomberg, of US-based ZapThink, have even suggested that the solution lies in 'extreme programming', a collaborative programming method that simultaneously deals with design, testing, deployment and management of programs. "The vision between design and run time is going to blur as companies start to release web services. For example, if you are dynamically discovering web services components, you can't know what components are being used in the design stage, so you have to do testing while in production. Testing overlaps with management," says Bloomberg.
Johnson at Ovum agrees: "You can never know how a web service will be used in the real world. Problems will occur in processes and interactions on a functional level, and what is lacking today is the high level testing tools that enable a business manager to dig down into the process and find the problem."
But where will these high level tools emerge from? Current web services testing and performance management tools only fulfil a few of the requirements for designing and maintaining robust and dynamic B2B web services. For example, companies such as Keynote, which provides a third-party performance monitoring service, can monitor external web services, but only if the location of all the nodes of the service (i.e. customers, partners and components) are already known.
Similarly, Mercury Interactive claims that its web-based Test Director product could be used as a hosted collaborative tool to manage the testing of different web services components that exist behind the firewalls of several independent businesses. Once again however, this would only be relevant in cases where the web service process was pre-planned and set in stone by the partners involved.
New tools needed
In reality, CIOs will have to integrate an entire stack of different technologies to effectively tackle the problems associated with maintaining external web service-based applications, says ZapThink's Bloomberg.
This stack can roughly be defined as 'web services management', and could include business process and systems management tools, business activity monitoring functionality, collaborative development tools.
Clearly, much of this is on the technology horizon. No vendor has yet developed the required level of complexity in their web services products, and if an organisation wished to build such a stack themselves they would need to integrate a range of products from multiple vendors, including middleware, business intelligence and testing tools vendors.
Although Mercury Interactive is said to be working with web services management start-up Confluent Software (formerly Corporate Oxygen) to design such a stack of technology, and Hewlett-Packard is extending its OpenView network and systems management suite to handle web services management, most analysts do not believe a fully functional B2B web services performance management solution is coming any time soon.
The Catch 22: Tools vendors are reluctant to throw resources into B2B web services until there is clear evidence of latent demand; on the other hand, organisations are wary of building external web services because the lack of management tools will make it tough for them to maintain service levels.
How long will this delay the web services vision? Ted Schadler, an analyst at Forrester Research, says it could be another five years before there is mainstream adoption of B2B web services that will drive a market for external web services performance management products. In the build up to that, much of onus for ensuring that external web services infrastructures actually work will fall on IT organisations themselves.
