Always look back

At the beginning of his career, Spicer worked at IBM and Bell Labs on early cellular technology, back when cell phones weighed in the same range as a heavyweight boxer.

“I spent the second half of my career seeing the problems of applications interoperations. The irony is that I have actually gone back to the first half of my career for the solution, which was at Bell Laboratories where I built a lot of networking technologies. I was doing various kinds of networks for 12 years, and I credit that [with helping me generate] the solution to the problem I saw in the second half of my career,” Spicer says.

That solution, quite naturally, is Flamenco Networks. The Alpharetta, Ga.-based company, as Spicer tells it, is named after the traditional Spanish dance because he likes to watch Flamenco dancers, and “as a networking company, our goal is to get people connected — let’s dance,” he explains.

Spicer said that he founded Flamenco to provide what the major Web services players do not. Whereas Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, BEA Systems, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Oracle concentrate on providing the ability to deploy Web services, Flamenco can guarantee messaging for business-class Web services, he says.

“There is a missing piece here in that the Internet is not reliable, it’s not secure, it’s not a lot of things. And we can help fix that problem. Flamenco Networks provides the actual connection piece to guarantee delivery,” Spicer says.

David Smith, an analyst at Gartner, a market consulting firm based in Stamford, Conn., says Flamenco is doing more than just filling in the holes that companies such as Sun and Microsoft are leaving in Web services.

“Flamenco is entering a market that at least initially Sun and Microsoft are not going after,” Smith says.

Flamenco and its main competitor, Grand Central, have some challenges ahead of them — namely that they are small companies, and even though Sun and Microsoft are not likely to enter this space, IBM certainly could, Smith says.

“Flamenco is going into an area that is rather unproven at this point,” Smith says.

Despite the unknowns and the competition, Spicer is optimistic about Web services, and says essentially that the more companies adopt Web services, the bigger the pie gets.

Spicer is also confident that, unlike other IT fads that never quite realize their promise, Web services are here to stay.

“There is an analogy between Web services and databases, ironically,” Spicer says. “I’m old enough, and I was there at IBM when the relational database took off, and back then the whole idea of a relational database was very far out. They wrote this standard and several papers were published, and then people like Larry Ellison actually … built the thing.”

Back then, Spicer reminisces, there was an interesting debate about whether or not all applications would be rewritten to use relational databases. In time, applications came to use relational databases, and whether they were rewritten or new is arbitrary, Spicer says. Now, it would be ironic to find an application that doesn’t work with a relational database.

“Web services is the same thing. It’s a major shift, it’s not a wave. I’ve been through waves, like the b-to-b wave, where they crash on shore and recede,” Spicer says. “The relational database was something that was a permanent change, and we are still seeing the effects of it. I view Web services the same way: a permanent change.”