The standards body politic

“We are trying to get the major technology vendors to play the same game,” says Robless, who works at United’s Chicago office. And to do so, the travel industry has established the Travel Alliance, for which Robless serves as a member of the board of directors, to develop a common XML standard for communications. United is also a major player in the Liberty Alliance, the organization formed to develop authentication standards.

“So the message we want to put out is, ‘If you don’t play the same game, then we will lead the effort to define and build the standards, and you are going to have to live with them,’ ” Robless says.

Controversy has focused on the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), which was initially formed in February by industry heavyweights Microsoft, IBM, and others. Among the WS-I’s goals is the development of security specifications that define a set of extensions for SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) to create encrypted and interoperable Web services applications.

Microsoft and IBM, with their .Net and WebSphere Web services environments, respectively, are seen by many as dominate players. Sun Microsystems, with its Java-based Sun ONE (Open Net Environment) Web services architecture, has only recently been invited.

In an about-face, IBM recently proposed adding Sun as a full-fledged board member of the WS-I, a matter that must be approved by the board. Although Bob Sutor, director of IBM’s e-business standards strategy, says the proposal just “makes sense” because of customer support for Sun’s Java-based architecture, there remain large, unresolved questions about standards cooperation, particularly between Sun and Microsoft.

Interoperability concerns

For enterprise IT leaders such as United’s Robless; Larry Zucker, of Dollar Rent A Car; and Craig Murphy, of travel reservation company Sabre, the fear is that vendor competition could hold back the dream of interoperability. These and other CTOs recognize competition is the name of the game, but they ask for restraint and compromise from the vendors.

According to one analyst, CTO concerns about interoperability are valid. “Vendors get together under pressure, and the question is, Can they set aside their squabbles to [achieve workable standards]?” says Tyler McDaniel, director of application strategies at Hurwitz Group in Framingham, Mass. “The No. 1 thing to be concerned about is whether [the vendors] are doing anything useful, or are they promoting themselves?”

The problem looming, Robless says, is the possibility that he might be forced to pay more than necessary to deploy Web services architectures, if vendor competition results in failure to reach interoperability goals. “From our perspective, the issue [in adopting new technology] is not only being able to provide the best services to customers, but about the cost constraints as well,” he says.

Robless continues to extend United.com, his company’s travel-related, interactive Web site. “We’re building United.com in a way to provide partners either a Web service in their site to buy tickets or to provide a portal where they can take what they need from us and sow it on their own site.” The CTO’s team has a J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) environment on the back-end, with BEA’s WebLogic application server, and conducts XML parsing in-house. “We are opening applications to hotels and we are passing messages within ourselves and putting SOAP containers around [the messages] and sending them to others,” he says.

Putting the customer first

No CTO wants to end up with different interfaces to different products that in effect accomplish the same things. “That’s why Web services is something we are embracing and XML is something we are embracing,” Robless says. “With Web services and using XML, we have the potential of having a standard technology infrastructure by which we would all communicate. We are building infrastructure to do that.”

But Robless worries that if one view dominates the standards process, companies that adopt one company’s Web services architecture might find it difficult to integrate technology from competing vendors. “IBM, Microsoft, and Sun are all trying to be the leader and own the de facto monopoly as owner of the technology,” he says. “Everybody is out there trying to push it the way they are doing it, saying they are the only ones.”

Robless has no special regard for Sun’s role in the Liberty Alliance. “From our perspective, Sun just happens to have come up with the organizational infrastructure to put together something we really needed for authentication and identification,” he says. “That’s why we backed it and why we are trying to get Microsoft to join in.” To prove he’s not playing favorites, Robless points to the MSN site, which is actually United.com.

For the WS-I, Robless says, the industry needs the influence of all the standards that surround Web services. “It happens to be backed by Microsoft and IBM — so what? If the issue is getting to standardization, we are all for it. The idea is to back initiatives that will bring [United Airlines] what we need rather than backing a particular vendor,” Robless says.

Larry Zucker, executive director of application development with Dollar Rent A Car, in Tulsa, Okla., says vendor fighting makes enterprise IT planning difficult. “We certainly don’t like it when vendors fight, except over price,” Zucker says. “If everybody was in agreement, then things would be a lot easier for us.”

The vendors cannot ultimately control the standards development outcome, Zucker says. And he believes there is time to allow the standards fight to play itself out. “These rifts are ultimately determined not by these boards but by the marketplace. Everybody wants their technology to work better than the others. If you can bend the standard so that they work best for you, you’ve got a leg up,” he says.

Dollar Rent A Car, an early Microsoft .Net adopter, began a Web services initiative last year by linking Southwest Airlines’ Web site to Dollar’s reservation system using Microsoft’s SOAP Toolkit and a Windows 2000 Server. Customers can rent a car from Dollar without leaving Southwest’s site. This year, Dollar set up a Web services-enabled, Internet-based rate engine that allows customers to query and receive automatic responses.

The company was asked to be a founding member of the WS-I but declined. “It’s just not our thing,” Zucker says. “The standards boards can take quite awhile, so we’re in a wait-and-see position. I would like to tell them to put the customer first and create standards that work for everybody.”

Taking a more measured view is Craig Murphy, the CTO of Sabre, in Fort Worth, Texas. The travel reservations company, which owns Travelocity.com, joined the WS-I in mid-April. “I’m a realist,” Murphy says. “I think jockeying is natural. It is the result of entities competing for price power. It’s rational behavior.”

Murphy, who says his company is working on a Web services project, believes vendors will compete over standards but should be aware that they do so at the risk of losing customers. “To the extent [competition in the standards development process] facilitates progress towards time to market and technology advancement, it will be adopted,” Murphy says. “To the extent it dilutes products, it will be ignored.”