A service to lean on

InfoWorld: What specific problem is Grand Central trying to solve?

McDowall: The major issue is different than just wanting to transmit data in different formats. People want to have different processes for doing data transformation. So how do you manage all that? One of the fundamental problems is that when something fails, how do you know where it failed and who failed if you had to diagnose the problem?

InfoWorld: Why can’t people do this themselves using EAI (enterprise application integration) software?

McDowall: Those types of tools deliver significant value to enterprises when you get things up and running. But the cost of getting there from zero to a fully implemented thing is very, very expensive. With XML, we’ve all agreed to differ. But for me to share information with you, I want to make it such that if I want to do a transformation, I can do it. If you want to do a transformation, you can do it. [Under] some conditions you may want to make it public and with others you want a certain level of security. That’s the orchestration part of it. Grand Central’s value is when you want to hook up five, six partners. If every one of them has to implement every single part of that stack every time you want to connect somebody, the problem quickly becomes unmanageable.

InfoWorld: How does Grand Central manage the problem?

McDowall: From the base layer, we’re just implementing guaranteed messaging. We’re just using straight MQ Series software using off-the-shelf hardware and software. This allows us to have highly scalable, highly robust, fault-tolerant queues. If you push a message to Grand Central, we acknowledge we got it, at which point we’ll make sure it’s delivered to whichever intermediary. And we try until they’re available. Customers don’t have to load-balance and handle the spikes in traffic. On top of that, we’ve added directory services, so then you can have a private directory. One of the luxuries we have as a service is that we can pick the right tool for the right job.

InfoWorld: Where do you go from here?

McDowall: We’ve helped federate business process integration. The processes between companies are significantly simpler than the processes within companies. We have a vision to build a business process integration framework that hooks together 20 different companies and 20 different products. Everybody’s going to have the one business process integration framework behind the firewall. We’ll sit in the middle and help federate that.

InfoWorld: What impact will Web services have?

McDowall: The more Web services there are, the more mediation is required. If you’ve built a bunch of Web services and every other person you’re trying to talk to has built Web services, how you build them is going to be slightly different.

InfoWorld: As the CTO of a service, what’s your biggest challenge?

McDowall: We have a very high degree of quality and process, but [we] also have to introduce a high degree of innovation. Some of the ways we do that is having fairly fast release cycles. We have a new cycle almost every eight weeks. We can do this because we are a service rather than an application, so we don’t have to go through the install cycle. But we have a challenge in that, to innovate, we’ve got to be very careful. I can’t use my customer as a test bench. They get a little cranky about that.