Web services registry aids both IT and business interests

As the Sprint Business Services (SBS) IT group rationalized its existing Web services and figured out what services were still needed, it became clear that something else was needed: a registry for Web services. In a large company, having an SOA in and of itself doesn’t prevent various IT groups from duplicating others’ efforts, nor does it prevent customers from asking IT to develop services that already exist. A shared services registry, however, can do that.

Sprint now has about 25 components in its Infravio X-registry, with 25 more to be added this fall and plans for several hundred more in 2006, although it didn’t take this scale to get the ball rolling. “We knew at 15 components that we’d need a registry,” notes Edmund Vazquez, Web services program manager of the enterprise-focused Sprint Business Services (SBS) unit.

Now, internal customers and IT staff can see if a needed service already exists, or if a similar one exists that can be used as a basis to develop a new one more quickly and inexpensively, Vazquez says. Today, “we reuse assets,” he adds.

The benefits of the registry go beyond reducing development costs. Architecture manager Vijay Musuvathy says business managers quickly realized that the registry could serve their customers, including telecommunications users and service providers (for such functions as repair, resale, and installation). They urged that the catalog of Web services be published online (infoworld.com/3189), so that customers and business partners “could see what kind of capabilities they can liberate.”

Vazquez says this catalog has gained Sprint new business. One reason is that customers using Web services standards such as SOAP, WSDL, and WS-Security can integrate these Web services within their own environments, reducing the cost to both the customer and Sprint, and often speeding deployment.

Typically, it’s the sales team that identifies a customer’s need for a service. “It’s not IT calling IT,” Vazquez notes. Ideally, the sales force can promote the use of an existing service — which it knows about from the registry — to encourage more business from customers.