Technology circle

GUIDANCE SOLUTIONS is a professional services firm that focuses primarily on Internet application development in both the Microsoft and Java arenas. The Marina Del Rey, Calif.-based company’s CTO, Howard Kolodny, says the company has evolved over the past two years from working with Internet startups to Fortune 1000 companies that are leveraging the Internet to improve business. InfoWorld spoke with Kolodny about Web services and how the company is responding to the current economic climate.

Today, it seems there is a greater emphasis on short-term payback, while keeping initial investments low.

Yeah, the projects are smaller, shorter in duration. A lot of them are focused more maybe on cost-cutting than they are on new revenue opportunities. We’re also seeing some sort of second-generation Internet activity. We have a site out there, we got it out there quickly, it’s been there for awhile, but now we want to redo it better, either with a better interface or a more solid technical underpinning, those types of things.

So people are going back in and working on infrastructure issues?

Both infrastructure and interface issues, I think it’s fair to say. Interface is not my expertise area, but it does seem like organizations are finding that they may not have done the best job the first time around, even on the interface. And the infrastructure, I think there’s a couple of things happening there. One is that as technologies evolve; they want to bring in newer, better technologies. We are seeing interest in terms of potentially moving to Linux as a cost savings activity. As capacity increases, scaling is important as well.

The conventional wisdom around Web services was that people would use that internally first because there are latency issues, security issues, etc. And yet your experience is that people are now using it to go across organizations.

Our first actual Web services implementation was an internal application … a publishing company was using content management systems to publish to their Web sites. And they were using SOAP transactions to do that publishing with the idea that if they needed to syndicate the content to an outside vendor, they could do that as well. But [now] what we’re seeing really is the small groups of collaborating business partners using Web services as a way to collaborate. The vision — or hype, depending on what you want to call it — has been these public UDDI registries, where you go out, you find a service, you sign up, and life is good. But what we’re finding is organizations aren’t doing that. They’re using the Web services technology in order to share transactions between them. And it’s not really leveraging UDDI as much as defining XML documents and SOAP transactions and then using that as the mechanism.

What’s your take on the battles between Microsoft, IBM, Sun, and BEA, as they relate to this new, emerging space?

It’s tough to call right now. I think it’s still very early. The one thing I will say is that I have been surprised in that I’ve heard some pretty serious Java bigots very interested in what Microsoft is doing, more so than I would have expected. I’m impressed with what they’re doing beyond what the other folks are at this point, just in terms of the mind share I think that they’re getting. I still think it’s too early to declare a winner, in my eyes at least.

What do you need to see happen around Web services to make your life easier?

I wouldn’t even say it’s to make life easier. It’s the standard things that you keep hearing about. It’s more confidence in security, ways of determining quality of service, things like that. I think we’re still early in understanding how to tune these things. It’s just really bringing it to the enterprise, making it ready for production, large volumes. One of the issues we’re facing with XML is the verbosity of it. … Quite frankly, the database is choking right now, and we’re having to go in ourselves to fix that and write custom code to fix that because it’s a feature that the product is supposed to have that just doesn’t work on a huge file.