Web services offer many solutions

WHEN MORE THAN 700 people in this economy show up for a two-day InfoWorld conference on Web services in San Francisco, you know fundamental change is in progress. The question most people want answered is, How will these technologies actually change software applications for the better?

People get the idea that Web services are a set of industry-standard protocols based on XML, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) that will make it easier to integrate applications. What most people still don’t understand is that these technologies will also create an entire new category of software known as collaborative applications.

The trouble with most software today is that just about every application we use is point-to-point in nature. That means it can effectively reach out to only one data source at a time. All that is about to change — and it’s high time it did.

Most software today works by interacting with another piece of software to access data in a sequential manner, one interaction at a time. But imagine a world where software applications could automatically reach out to multiple applications simultaneously. With that kind of infrastructure in place you could radically alter five major software categories in 18 months to 24 months.

One thing that Web services will do immediately is make it easier for people to share information automatically after it has been entered in an application just once. That can be done by leveraging Web services to link their desktop applications with those of another group of people either formally using a knowledge management application or informally through ad hoc groups using peer-to-peer applications such as Groove.

Another change will come in the area of supply-chain management software. The ability to push data to a supply-chain application from multiple event monitors on a network should eliminate the archaic notion of a supply chain in favor of a collaborative matrix model that for the first time will reflect the actual business.

Business intelligence will no longer be an oxymoron. Rather than have business-intelligence applications that with a high degree of inaccuracy tell users what might have gone wrong after the fact, a new generation of collaborative business applications will be capable of monitoring events in real time to give people the information they need to avert a disaster.

E-commerce applications will change for the better. Instead of users trying to compare fares across five travel sites, one application will immediately poll every site offering a relevant flight and bring that information back to the user.

And finally, the bane of every IT manager’s existence: network and systems management. In the future, devices will use Web services to report their health back to a local monitoring station, which in turn will roll up data and forward it back to a management console.

These are exciting times. If none of this makes your heart beat a little bit faster, you might want to check your pulse because you’re probably dead.